Boccaccio’s Decameron

The Decameron Web was begun in 1994 as a participatory hypertext project used to teach the Decameron. In 1997, STG encoded the text of the Decameron in SGML, and delivered it via a search engine.

The Decameron consists of a hundred stories in Italian, told from the point of view of ten young Florentines who, in the early summer of the year 1348, had taken refuge in the countryside to escape the plague in the city. In 1994-1995, Massimo Riva, together with his graduate and undergraduate students, began to compile the Decameron Web, modeling it on the Victorian Web. His goal was to develop a teaching tool that presented the text of Boccaccio’s Decameron accompanied by secondary material about the author and medieval Italy.

In 1997, the Decameron Web received an NEH grant, and STG worked with Massimo Riva and his students and project managers to enhance it. STG’s primary contribution was the encoding of the Italian and English of the Decameron in SGML, and its deployment using a powerful search engine.

STG developed a DTD based on TEI-Lite for the Decameron text. STG staff encoded portions of the text and supervised further work by graduate students in the Italian Studies Department. Dynaweb 4.1 was used to deliver the SGML encoded text from the STG web server. The structural encoding permitted searching on selected structural units, such as whole text, frame, novelle. All named characters and geographic locations in the text were tagged and could be retrieved by means of an index that specified attributes relevant for scholarly research and teaching, such as gender, occupation, and social role of each named character.

STG’s involvement with the Decameron Web continued and contributed to the development of further functionality, including the use of metadata to classify secondary sources and the automation of linking between the text and resource materials.

In 2001, STG offered DTD development and SGML consulting for the publication of two of Boccaccio’s minor works: the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta and the Corbaccio. Light SGML encoding was done by Vika Zafrin, Italian Studies graduate student, and the text was delivered and searched from the SGML source using Dynaweb 4.1.

Since that time, the Italian and English texts have been converted from SGML to XML, and are no longer being served by the Dynaweb software. STG worked with Vika Zafrin and the staff of the Decameron Project to implement a simpler system using php and standard, open source XML software.

In 2009 and 2010, the Decameron Web was redesigned and updated to have a more contemporary look, to conform to current HTML standards, and to work with updated HTML technologies such as javascript.

Boccaccio’s Decameron is a project of Italian Studies

Contributors to this project include Vika Zafrin (Graduate Student), Elli Mylonas (CDS), Giovanna Roz (STG), Massimo Riva (Primary Investigator), Michael Hemment (Project Manager), Mike Papio (Scholar)

Funding for this project came from National Endowment for the Humanities