The poster offers a critical reading of Carlo Collodi's book “The Adventures of Pinocchio. Story of a puppet", through a sentiment analysis of the text. Published in 1883, the original story is much richer than the various cinematic adaptations.

Poster designed for the exhibition "Dearest Pinocchio", at ADI Design Museum (Dec 2023–Feb 2024).

Pinocchio is famous for his iconic nose that lengthens at each lie; however, this feature is mentioned only in a few chapters of the book. The story follows the puppet pranks: we read as he takes advantage of people close to him (Geppetto, Blue Fairy, Talking Cricket) and gets cheated by those he meets along his path (the Cat and the Fox, the owner of the Puppet Theatre, the schoolmates, Fire Eater, etc.). Labeling a child as bad if he tells lies or does not obey his parents is reductive. As the story by Collodi well explains, different environmental, societal, and cultural conditions influence the free will of kids. 

The poster interprets the story by visualising the type of words used by the author. The abundance of darker shades of blue indicates that the tone of voice and atmosphere of the story are not as playful as we might remember.

Through a sentiment analysis of the text, a color scale (from blue to orange) represents the the range of emotions described by the author. Based on the number of words with negative connotations (e.g. kill, anger, sadness, steal) and positive connotations (e.g. happiness, hug, joy, good), each chapter is identified with a numerical value, then visualized with a color gradient. The range starts from -3.8 and goes up to +2.3: the lexicon presents more negative emotions than positive ones.

Furthermore, depending on the length of the text, the chapters are represented in the form of a Treemap, a visual model used to visualize data hierarchies. Finally, at the bottom right, there is a drawing of Pinocchio based on the illustration by E. Mazzanti present on the cover of the first edition of the book (1883).

On the occasion of the 140th anniversary of the first edition of the book “The Adventures of Pinocchio – Story of a Puppet” by Carlo Collodi, the ADI Design Museum presents a selection of projects dedicated to the iconic puppet. The exhibition shows 62 different interpretations of Pinocchio realised by Italian designers.