Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in città: un esperimento computazionale

Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città is a collection of short novels written by Italo Calvino between 1958 and 1963. In 1963 all the stories are collected in a single book by the publisher Einaudi. Grounded on the lexicon-grammar data collected from the novels, the paper aims to describe Marcovaldo’s stories and passions, in order to analyse the data quantitatively. The text will be semi-automatically processed to draw attention to the latent information it could potentially hide. Examples are recurring patterns or other phenomena which are difficult to directly observe by human readers. The text processing will focus on lexical, morpho-syntactic and semantic analyses, starting from the mere machine-readable representation of the text to the topic modeling tasks based on machine learning methods.