For my paper, I chose to investigate the theme of extracting meaning from data in Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”. The ideas of infinite datasets, subjective vs. objective interpretation, and the meaning of “meaning” all come into play in this study. The main conclusion of my analysis was the necessity of having some kind of framework or context through which to interpret data. Data by itself is meaningless; it must be interpreted through a “lens” of some kind to convey any information. To highlight this concept, I chose to create as my project as program which executes a One-Time Pad encryption operation. This type of encryption, if properly performed, is theoretically unbreakable: that is to say, if one does not have the cypher key (i.e. “context”), one cannot reveal the hidden meaning. The link below will take you to a video demonstration of the program. I will also try to upload a copy of the Matlab code files in case anyone wants to play around with them.

https://drive.google.com/a/g.clemson.edu/file/d/0B9OjFVwprJnoR1lLeHdiVDdDVmc/view?usp=sharing