Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter's night a traveler), Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a character, Lotaria, who uses an "electronic brain" to read her books. Her computer can read a book "in a few minutes", and show her all the words in it, sorted by frequency. In fact, Calvino was fascinated by the research of Mario Alinei, who in the late 1960s created Spogli Elettronici dell'Italiano Contemporaneo, an academic analysis of Italian literary masterworks (including Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno). In his 1979 novel), Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a character, Lotaria, who uses an "electronic brain" to read her books. Her computer can read a book "in a few minutes", and show her all the words in it, sorted by frequency. In fact, Calvino was fascinated by the research of Mario Alinei, who in the late 1960s created, an academic analysis of Italian literary masterworks (including Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno).

Alinei's team looked at words used in the Italian language over time, noting changes in their frequency. You can imagine how this work was done forty years ago: operators punching computing cards, a big mainframe computer being fed words overnight, and an encoded output that had to be typeset again into book form.

Now our computing infrastructure can do Alinei's work in a few seconds. Starting today, you'll find a cloud of "Common Terms and Phrases" on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.