12 july - 5 august 2018
Minerva is the result of the collaboration between different academic and professional realities, composed of designers from the Density Design Lab of the Politecnico di Milano, computer scientists from the University of Duisburg-Essen and a team of historians of philosophy from the University of Milan.
Minerva was designed as a digital tool to support research in the field of philosophical historiography and allows researchers to investigate the corpus of Immanuel Kant, the only philosopher of which we have a complete digitalization of their work. Its importance can be summarized in two fundamental components. The first is the ability to represent the evolution of the Kantian lexicon, exposing the frequency of the terms and their mutual hierarchy; the second is the possibility to work directly on the text by accessing different levels of reading, searching for specific lemmas of interest and by dynamically editing notes related to the structured text.
This series of tables represents the intermediate phase of the project, in which hidden structures of the philosopher’s thoughts were explored and displayed for the first time, including the connections between the works and the words, and the appearance, disappearance and evolution of Kant’s most frequently used lemmas during the years of his production.
Valerio Pellegrini
Pellegrini is a communication designer based in Milan. Specifically, he deals with data visualization, graphic design, illustration and editorial design. He works with Italian and international titles such as BBC, Wired (UK, US, DE, IT), Popular Science, Corriere della Sera, GQ, BOAT Magazine, Foreign Policy, and with research laboratories, agencies and companies in Italy, the US, UK, China and the Netherlands.
He has a degree in Communication Design from the Politecnico di Milano. He has conducted research at the Density Design laboratory where he developed Minerva, a tool to visualize the relationship between the words of Immanuel Kant’s works. His work has been exhibited at the Triennale di Milano in the exhibition AFRICA – Big Change/Big Chance; and at the exhibition Le Mappe del Sapere, at Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste for the exhibition Maria Teresa e Trieste, at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts in the exhibition TOP 40 – International Juried Competition, at the Kunsthalle Museum in Zurich in the exhibition They Printed It! and at the BBS-pro space in Prato in the exhibition Identità17.
His works have been included in books published by Taschen, Gestalten, Rizzoli, and the Oxford Press.
He twice won the Kantar Award – Information Is Beautiful Awards – Celebrating Excellence in Data Visualization and Information Design as Infographic – Gold in 2016 and Best Individual Contribution in 2013, and two Malofiej Awards with Corriere della Sera (2015) and DensityDesign (2012).
