Towards the electronic Esposizioni: the challenges of the online commentary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article provides a brief introduction to Brown University's Virtual Humanities Lab (VHL)'s major new project: the electronic Esposizioni. The Esposizioni, like other texts available on Brown University's Decameron Web, is a major vernacular work by Boccaccio, and is the text of his unfinished lecture series on Dante's Commedia. The electronic Esposizioni project is fundamentally concerned with the definition of the relationship between two canonical medieval authors, Dante and Boccaccio, as expressed through the primary (commented) text and the secondary (commentary) text.The first part of the article provides an overview of the historical and literary contexts of Boccaccio's commentary on Dante. A great demand for explication and analysis of Dante's poem sprang up in Italy immediately after Dante's death in 1321, and Boccaccio's Esposizioni forms part of this tradition. However, unlike other Dante commentaries, the Esposizioni was not written with the intention of becoming a “published” book: it is instead the notes for the public lectures on Dante which Boccaccio gave in Florence in 1373-74. The oral intention and nature of this text is one of the elements upon which the electronic Esposizioni project focuses. One of the major benefits of the electronic medium is that we are able to distance the text from the material format of the bound book, which fixes the oral text as a canonical and immutable object.The second part of the article provides further information about how humanities computing has developed in the Italian Studies Department at Brown. Following a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the famous Decameron Web now forms part of the VHL, which has a dual role: to provide information about the civic, literary, and intellectual culture of Early Modern Italy to a broad audience of students and specialists alike; and to develop a variety of electronic tools for collaborative teaching and research. This section also considers the potential audience for the electronic Esposizioni project within the popular field of “Dante studies”, and compares the project to the already-established Dartmouth Dante Project, which is also concerned with Dante commentary.The final section of the paper presents the electronic edition of the Esposizioni, with a technical description of the commented and commentary texts, a discussion of the structural and semantic encoding principles, and some examples of the encoding in practice. Due to its nature as a hybrid medieval text, of which no autograph manuscript survives, Boccaccio's Esposizioni inevitably contains uncertainties. Rather then try to create a definitive online edition, we are thus constructing a Virtual Editing House which will allow scholars with privileged access the opportunity to comment and add their own annotations to the work. The project thus does not only present the commentary and commented text together for the first time in the digital medium, but will allow the creation of a new and ongoing commentary to Dante's poem.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".