What a Difference a Sea Makes in the <i>Decameron</i>: The Mediterranean, a Structural Space of the Novella
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay presents a reading of the Mediterranean sea as a narrative space in the Decameron. Through a reading of text and images, the paper illustrates the categories of mobile/static and foreign/domestic at work in the Decameron. It also introduces a third epistemological category, hybridity, at the centre of this study, which aims to establish the role and function of the Mediterranean in the fabula—the plot development—as well as in the structure of the novella itself, and ultimately in Boccaccio’s poetics. Is the Mediterranean a “structural space” in (and of) the novella, hence in/of the Decameron? Does it make and forge “experiences” of women of different religions (and social origins) that differ from the experiences of men in the Medieval Mediterranean? The article proposes different cases of women travelling in the Decameron and discusses the paralysis and diaspora of women’s identity in the hybrid space of mobile Mediterranean, a foreign space of immobilization and dangers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".