The 4banks bibliographical project goes back to the earliest date in the history of the project, and it is now the latest in coming to fruition. In completing this hub website, I sought to bring together the major goals of the system as a whole. The Critique website was a first major accomplishment; and the websites on Religion and Politics will follow shortly.
There is thus a sense of closure. What matters most, and what this hub website aims at explaining, is the concept of a website conceived as developing an argument. Each website of the cluster, and all the websites together, propose more than an informative database: the goal is that of an interplanar system that brings together, in the dynamic way digitality makes possible, a variety of approaches and interpretive models.
On a personal note, as I was reviewing Mortimer Adler’s work I was struck by his prescience of the intellectual goals which could only be dimly perceived in his pre-digital setting, but which were formulated so clearly as to express quite explicitly what became the goals of our 4banks cluster. I bring this out briefly in my notes below on the Syntopicon and on its context and relevance.
Even more personally, I would like to close by citing the dedication on a copy of Adler’s How to Read a Book, a dedication from our son Federico, who gave me this book on the occasion of the Urkesh study season which took place in 2011 when it became impossible to conduct field work as had been planned. We were working then on the Urkesh Global Record (the UGR), and were developing in earnest all the digital implications of our research. The dedication reads:
... in the hope that the UGR inspires future generations to need "How to Read a Website"...
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