Tecnologica cosa: Modeling Storyteller Personalities in Boccaccio's Decameron
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in digital humanities for scholars analyzing historical texts, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The researchers tackled the problem of identifying distinct storyteller personalities in Boccaccio's Decameron using digital humanities tools on a limited medieval Italian dataset, resulting in a released dataset and findings that supervised classification was difficult while topic modeling extracted thematic profiles.
We explore Boccaccio's Decameron to see how digital humanities tools can be used for tasks that have limited data in a language no longer in contemporary use: medieval Italian. We focus our analysis on the question: Do the different storytellers in the text exhibit distinct personalities? To answer this question, we curate and release a dataset based on the authoritative edition of the text. We use supervised classification methods to predict storytellers based on the stories they tell, confirming the difficulty of the task, and demonstrate that topic modeling can extract thematic storyteller "profiles."