Tecnologica cosa: Modeling Storyteller Personalities in Boccaccio's Decameron

TL;DR

This paper investigates the personalities of storytellers in Boccaccio's Decameron using digital humanities tools, including classification and topic modeling, to analyze limited medieval Italian text data.

Contribution

It introduces a dataset of Decameron stories and applies supervised classification and topic modeling to analyze storyteller personalities, demonstrating new computational approaches in digital humanities.

Findings

Storyteller classification is challenging but feasible.

Topic modeling reveals thematic profiles of storytellers.

Digital tools can extract personality signals from limited medieval texts.

Abstract

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."