Domain and scope

The aim of this project was, first of all, to conceptualise and formalise in an ontology (CoSMO) the interpretive process outlined by Calvino in the first chapter of his “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”. Secondly, to exploit the ontology for the interpretation of new texts with the help of a user-friendly easy to use tool. Following Protege guidelines, we started our work sharing ideas about the domain and the scope of the future ontology. We agreed to work in the domain of literary analysis and to build a structure that could define Calvino’s literary point of view on the ideal text for the next millennium and, consequently, the features that it should have.

Competency questions

- Which textual features should we generally consider when analyzing a text?
- Which are the concepts used by Calvino in his interpretation?
- Are there common features in the texts cited by Calvino in his Six Memos?
- Are these features quantifiable?
- Are rhetorical effects relevant for the interpretation?
- Are there links between rhetorical figures and Calvino's features?
- What degree of abstraction is necessary to represent Calvino's criticism?
- Is Calvino's criticism biased or is it grounded on objective hypothesis?
- Is Calvino's criticism universally extendable to any text?
- Are there some objective features of text that we can use to link Calvino's interpretation?
- Are there controlled co-occurences of objective text phenomena that correspond to Calvino's main concepts?

Enumeration of important terms

We read the chapter “Lightness” several times from different perspectives. Once to get a general idea of the type and the amount of information that we would have to handle, another time focusing on the enumeration of important terms and conceptual nodes in the text, then trying to find patterns and common features among the cited textual examples that were correlated with certain literary qualities. To actually implement the ontology we decided to use Protégé, as it is the most common and widespread tool for building ontologies. We devoted some of our time studying the general structure of ontologies (classes, properties, attributes, individuals) and more specific functions of the program.

Definition of classes and properties

We defined the classes following a combined development process, both from the upper and the lower parts of the ontology. Specifically, we started with the definition of the “central” classes, in the sense that we thought them to be central and crucial for Calvino’s critical process. We perceived this “centrality” in some groups of words linked by a common semantics, terms that were recurrent and openly mentioned in the text (like “Lightness”). From those nodes, we structured the hierarchy both creating leaves to include the most specific concepts, and superclasses to group already existing classes into more general concepts. We then provided connections (Object properties) and defined Data types for the individuals. Anyway, this was not a linear process: we had to continuously re-adjust our thoughts on some topics exploiting previous knowledge of the domain and further readings when necessary (listed in bibliography). This was the most demanding part of our work: to give a scheme to abstract and variously connected themes. For the definition of classes and properties we relied on previous knowledge of several ontologies like FRBR, FOAF, SKOS, DC, CIDOC-CRM. We looked for literary text oriented ontologies but we could only find projects and research, not fully developed ontologies. Therefore, we reused only few classes and properties and we mostly created our owns. For this reason we focused on providing highly controlled definitions of concepts, reusing a powerful lexical resource like WordNet.

Ontology population and generation

When the ontology structure was done, we moved on to populating it. Since our overall purpose was to make Calvino’s interpretation applicable to new unseen texts, we decided not to use the texts already mentioned inside the book and to search for some other examples that could fit the interpretation and were suitable in terms of identified features. We analysed the poems to create appropriate individuals in the ontology, creating our kowledge base. When the ontology was ready we extracted the RDF and we used it to render the documentation using Widoco, while for the graph visualization we used WebVOWL.

Knowledge extraction

In the end we thought to represent the knowledge extraction in a website (page “Knowledge extraction”) where the user can explore the topics and the rhetorical effects distribution in the different poems through simple buttons. This was possible thanks to some Javascript functions and CSS.

Further developments

We expect this ontology to be a starting point for further developments. In fact, we hope that it could be enriched with more precise definitions for those textual features that were discovered by Calvino. In particular, computational literary criticism could be helpful in defining quantitative measures for the concepts and features that we detected, so as to automatically extract the knowledge that we derived from Calvino’s criticism from any text.

Bibliography

- Bartalesi, V. Meghini, C. (2016) Using an Ontology for Representing the Knowledge on Literary Texts: the Dante Alighieri Case Study. Semantic Web Journal, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 385-394, 2017. DOI 10.3233/SW-150198

- Bermejo, J. (2007) A Simplified Guide to Create an Ontology. Retrieved on June 18th 2019 from http://tierra.aslab.upm.es/documents/controlled/ASLAB-R-2007-004.pdf

- Calvino, I. (1993) Six memos for the next millennium. New York: Vintage.

- Ciotti, F. (2016) Toward a formal ontology for narrative. Matlit: Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura. Vol. 4, Nº 1 (2016). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-1_2

- D'Annunzio, G., & Roncoroni, F. (2003). Poesie. Milano: Garzanti.

- Dickinson, E. (1960) The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown.

- Gangemi, A. (2009) Best practices in ontology design. Retrieved on June 18th 2019 from http://sssw.org/2009/slides/SSSW09-AG-slides.pdf

- Jayawardana, V. (2017) Ontology Generation and Visualization with Protégé. Retrieved on June 18th 2019 from https://medium.com/@vindulajayawardana/ontology-generation-and-visualization-with-prot%C3%A9g%C3%A9-6df0af9955e0

- Kelly, R. A. et al. (2010) Toward an Ontology of Rhetorical Figures. Conference: Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Design of Communication, SIGDOC 2010, São Carlos, São Paulo state, Brazil, September 26-29, 2010. DOI 10.1145/1878450.1878471.

- Khan, F. et al. (2016) Leveraging a Narrative Ontology to Query a Literary Text. Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. Dagstuhl, Germany. DOI 10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2016.10

- Martin, W. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson (Cambridge Introductions to Literature). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511611025

- Pavese, C. (1984). Verrà la morte e avrà tuoi occhi. Torino: G. Einaudi.

- Petrarca, F., & Bettarini, R. (2005). Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Torino: Einaudi.

- Staab S., Studer R. (eds) (2009) Handbook on Ontologies. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.