Italo Calvino's ‘destini incrociati’. An experiment of semantic narrative modelling and visualisation

Abstract

Il castello dei destini incrociati, thanks to its logical and combinatorial structure, lends itself to experiencing a formal ontology to achieve a semantic visualisation of the narrative created by the author using the tarot cards. Specifically, this research aims to investigate the macchina narrativa combinatoria ([1]: 124) of the work using Semantic Web technologies to formalise and analyse textual aspects that concern narrative and compositional structures of the collection. Data has been analysed in the light of three main aspects: the semantics conveyed by the tarot cards, the text structure and the relations between cards. The result is ODI (Ontologia dei Destini incrociati di Italo Calvino) and its corresponding Knowledge Base (BACODI, Base di Conoscenza dell’Ontologia dei Destini incrociati di Italo Calvino) that represent and describe the first complete edition of the work, the description of tarot cards - both as artefacts of the specific tarot deck and as narrative instances in the text - and the semantic links and narrative relations between tarot cards in each story, considering their coexistence in a single environment. All the contents can be browsed through MACODI (Macchina Combinatoria dell’Ontologia dei Destini incrociati di Italo Calvino), a web application for a multilayered view of the knowledge stored in BACODI.