What is CoSMO Project?

CoSMO (Calvino Six Memos Ontology) tries to conceptualise and formalise the interpretive process carried out by Calvino in the first chapter “Lightness” of his “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, 1985. The book was written to reflect on certain values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature identified by the author and situated within the perspective of the new millennium. The writer’s ideas were grounded and explained through direct textual examples (citations, references) belonging to texts of various periods and authors.

We decided to build the ontology to create a way to apply this critical process to new texts.

In our work, we tried to give an order to the great multiplicity of interrelated ideas expressed in the chapter. The process was fairly challenging because of the aforementioned quantity of topics and the intrinsic difficulty of dealing with such abstract literary concepts.

After a careful reading of the text, we deduced some fundamental concepts that led the critical analysis and were therefore identified as features that a text should have or not according to the writer. We assigned them into classes, the main of which are "Lightness" and "Heaviness" as naturally opposed concepts. They both have subclasses that explain some particular manifestations. For example, Lightness is linked to light, motion, granularity.

We also felt the need to introduce some concepts and relations on rhetorical effects (like repetitions, omissions, similarity). Although they were not explicitly analysed or mentioned in the text, they were, in our opinion, necessary to validate our interpretation in an objective way.