Visualizations
Carlo Emilio Gadda's life could be actually represented by the three cities he inhabited throughout his life:
In that specific order Gadda lived in each city and in each of these cities he left something behind.
Many of the author's past items and works are stored in archives situated in these cities.
Hence, with this knowledge I set up onto investigating the relevance of these main cities.
First of all, I worked on investigating the locations mentioned in the archival records. Hence I extracted all the places mentioned throughout the records and the map beside is the result.
In this case, as Milan, Florence and Rome do maintain their central roles, as they appear as the cities that are mentioned the most in the archival records.
What's interesting is that there are mentions of cities outside of Italy. Obviously, the presence of Buenos Aires shouldn't surprise us as Gadda worked there right after the war, while a few more places actually represent different travels he made throughout his life.
Then, I then worked onto analyzing the locations of the archives themselves
In fact, it's interesting to see whether the importance of the cities, Milan, Florence and Rome, was respected even after the author's death and whether his own pendant for these cities was kept in his decisions for the future.
So, I investigated on the cities that currently host an archive with items that past beloned to Carlo Emilio Gadda.
The result was that although Milan did keep its importante, Florence and Rome lost their status to new cities: Pavia, where a new study center around Gadda and Villafranca di Verona, which consists of the inheritance left to Arnaldo Liberati.
This is an interesting dispersion, especially as it proves that there have been external factors that were involved after Gadda's death and that changed his own dispositions and personal nature
A charactertistic that is common in archives that belonged to authors is their inner heterogenity, especially with the further advacements of technology as slowly more and more type of objects, supports and shapes were included in archives.
This was the case of Gadda's own archives as they contained not only materials connected to his own works, but also his own personal items and even articles from papers about him or his friends.
The variety of items found in the archives was an interesting theme to discover and analyze albeit not without its own difficulty, due to both the lack of actual common guidelines and the heterogenity of the records and archival descriptions.
For this we organized the description in three main categories.
We utilized this term to refer to the shape of the writing, hence whether the writing in this case it is manuscript, typescript, printed, drafted, an object, a photograph or a drawing.
This was done to investigate the inner means in which the message is conveyed and shaped through throughout the entirety of the archives.
Interestingly there is a wide presence of printed objects, which is not strange if we take into consideration that this does not only refer to the printed copy of the author's published books and his own library, but also the huge amount of articles, grey literature and printed object that Gadda collected.
Manuscript materials are also quite close as most of the archives contain either elements connected to his published works or straight to the themes.
Finally there is a wide presence of objects which is quite interesting and also showcase quite the hoarding tendencies behind Gadda's own archival attitude.
In this case, instead with supporto we intend the material support behind the actual item.
This explains whether the documents are kept as loose pieces of papers or contained in specific unit of conditioning, contaning the documentary unit.
In this case, we chose to harmonize the various possible support through our own specific list based on both the archival guidelines and the content of Gadda's own archives. This allowed us a better comprehension and representation, especially due to the heterogenous nature of the archival description, as these items do come from different archives.
It is not a surprise that the printed support is yet one of the most popular categories, right with the loose papers, sustaining the image already proved with the previous category. It is especially to notice that although the variety is clear, it still is limited.
The fact that the printed support is so present through the archives is very interesting but also a clue to the historical period that these archives belong to, as it is a proof of the constant evolution of technology.
This is a further proof that this personal archive is quite interestingly an historical source in documenting also the technological evolution around writing and archival items.
With type we, instead, kept as much as possible the specifity of the definitions employed by the institution to better define the heterogenity of the items contained inside of the author's archives.
In fact, we use this to describe the physical typology of the items, going a step further from the previous descriptions.
This allowed us to showcase the vast variety inside of the archives showcasing the different elements contained that ranges from the loose papers of published works to private objects that were kept by the author's himself.
Contrary to the previous descriptions, it's the loose papers that seem to appear the most in the archives, right before newspaper articles and notebooks.
This visualization is a further proof of the inner heterogenity of obects and genres included in personal archives, especially in this case that goes onto combining different archives from different institutions.
The concept of thematic cards was entitled to assign to each archival record either a theme or a published work, as the item is related in some ways to such a concept.
This is a clear attempt to allow the user to consult the various elements that compose the author's own work and that will give an insight in his life and creative production.
Similarly to the heterogenity of the content, there's also a huge variety of works and themes inside of the author's archives and I wanted to investigate on such a concept, especially to see how the dispersion of these works and themes operates through the archives.
This is a general graph representing the distribution of the entirety of the thematic cards across the entirety of the archives
In this bubble chart you can see the distribution of the thematic cardsd connected to the published work.
Just from this we can have a clear trend, as the top three published works are the ones connected to Gadda's own personal life.
In fact, the top three values are:
As said above all three works are inherently connected to the author's life, either fictionalizing his real life experience or directly showcasing a autobiographical traits, further showcasing the author's will to leave something behind.
It is also interesting that Il castello di Udine and Meraviglie d'Italia were also published chronologically one after other, while L'Adalgisa, which was in part first published in La cognizione del dolore also appears right after the mentioned book.
It is interesting how the archive can show and attest to a direct reconstruction of the author's own creative and publishing process
In the bubble chart linked, instead, to the themes there's a further proof of the author's heterogenity when it comes to the nature of his archives.
This is a typical trait of personal and authorial archives but in this case it's very interesting to indagate which are the top five values:
It is without doubt showing the constant need and want of the author to reorder his own documents and his predospisition towards an archival nature.
It is interesting how the author does not only thing about storing inherently important documents - such as his own personal ones - but everything said about him and also some minor literature, clearly earning him the archiviomane name.
After having investigated on the most popular published works and themes present in the archives I then started working on the most popular published works and themes per archives
In fact, with the graphs above, you are able to see the thematic cards that compose each archive.
This is particularly interesting because although both in the published works and themes the Liberati archive and the Biblioteca Trivulziana archive are the ones with the most results, in the themes it's the Liberati archive that prevails, while in the published work it's the Biblioteca Trivulziana's own.
This shows an accurate representation of the two archives as while the Liberati archive has a vast variety in its presence, preserving objects and manuscripts alike, the Biblioteca Trivulziana's own contains probably the biggest part of the author's works, as it is based on the two funds, Citati and Roscioni, who were not only Gadda's closest friends but also were involved in the publishing process of his works.
Another difference between the graph of the published works and themes is that while the published work one seems more compact, the themes' own seems much more varied.
