Atlante Calvino. Literature and Visualization is a web platform through which it is possible to visually explore the corpus of narrative writings of Italo Calvino and learn about a series of literary inquiries conducted on his production.
The project lasted from 2017 to 2020 and it allowed designers and scholars to work together and to understand how to readapt tools and practices of data visualization in support of interpretive thinking. Differently from many other disciplines that exploit visualization, humanities work is based on qualitative judgements and ambiguous information. In our work we did our best to bring these aspects to the center of our methodologies and we developed new tools and languages.
The project gathers different forms of visualizations:
- guide visualizations, that give the measure of the entire corpus and allow for exploration
- analysis visualizations, that we consider as reifications of literary inquiries and that are organized across three itineraries of criticism
- in-depth analysis pages, that discuss the analysis and point to some reading tips.
To complement the atlas, we created a series of explanatory pages, to provide readers with information about the team work, goals and structure of the project, and the ‘capta’. We mind particularly about this last item: the term is synonymous with ‘data’ but with a constructivist sense that we use to highlight the humanistic nature of the observations that constitute the ground of this project of visual literary critique.
The project is developed using modern web technologies: Javascript ES6, React.js and d3.js.
→ Visit the platform at atlantecalvino.unige.ch
