Calvino and the algorithm: transverse reflections on time, space, tale, information, consistency and complexity

Abstract

The main focus of this essay is the relationship between temporal and spatial dimensions both in information and in textual representation (especially in narrative texts). The fulcrum is constituted by Italo Calvino’s reflections contained in Six memos for the next millennium, a work published posthumously and incomplete at the end of the 1980s. It is exactly at the beginning of the new millennium that the computer has joined the book as a cognitive tool, with relevant consequences for what concerns the relationship between linearity and spatiality in information. In this constantly changing scenario, an important role is fulfilled by the digital edition, a point of contact between document-centric and data-centric information, and therefore able to harmonize the two different but related principles of linearity and spatiality.