Starting from the multidisciplinary project Atlante Calvino. Literature and Visualization (https://atlantecalvino.unige.ch/?lang=en), which combines literary criticism and data visualization, the paper reflects on the challenges in fusing the diverse methodologies applied by literary scholars (Unité d’italien, University of Geneva) and a team of designers (DensityDesign Lab, Polytechnic University of Milan). The paper describes the process that led from a research hypothesis of literary criticism, designed for Italo Calvino’s fictional work, to the creation of a series of visualizations: in particular, we will focus on the type of text analysis conducted for data collection. Questioning the most common distant reading approach, the Atlante Calvino project adopted a different kind of distance from the text, closer to the practices of scalable reading. The paper aims to reason about the acquisitions and limitations that characterize this method, assigning a new role to the researcher in the context of Digital Humanities.
Giustetto et al. (Fri,) studied this question.