The Decameron Web was conceived at Brown University in 1995 by Massimo Riva and a group of doctoral students in the Italian Studies program, including Michael E. Papio, who later became the project’s co-editor. Launched a few years later, the D.W. remains one of the best-known online projects dedicated to Giovanni Boccaccio and his masterpiece.
A prototype of the D. W. took shape in Storyspace, a standalone software adopted in Prof. Riva’s class and created by Mark Bernstein’s Eastgate, the first hypertext publishing house, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The prototype of the D. W. became part of the Brown Storyspace Cluster.
The D. W. 1.0 originated from the desire to extend Prof. Riva’s Decameron class at Brown—and the pedagogical method on which it was based—into the much larger “playground” opened by the World Wide Web. Inspired on the one hand by George Landow’s model of encyclopedic hypertext, the Victorian Web, it was also grounded in an interpretation of the Decameron as a “writerly” hypertext (according to Roland Barthes’ and Landow’s definitions).
Mirroring the fictional setting of Boccaccio’s book, the garden where the ten members of the “gentile brigata” play their game of storytelling, the D. W. was conceived as a “virtual garden” in which students in Prof. Riva’s course, who were individually assigned, in a kind of role-playing game, the identity of one of the members of the brigata, could record and share their reading experiences. Moving onto the internet, the project thus envisioned an open digital space in which a classic text could evolve alongside a community of readers re-playing, as an interpretive game, the storytelling game initiated by the Decameron’s fictional narrators.
At the core of the original project was a TEI-compliant XML encoding of the text, developed with the assistance of Brown’s Scholarly Technology Group (later incorporated into the Center for Digital Scholarship) and supported by two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1999–2001). The encoding was meant to facilitate the interpretive game, enabling textual and cross-reference searches across both the Italian text (Branca-Einaudi, 1992 edition) and an English translation by J. M. Rigg (1903), selected because it was in the public domain. Over the years, additional resources contributed by scholars and students expanded the project, providing materials on Boccaccio, the historical and cultural context of the Decameron, thematic and narratological analyses, and studies of the work’s adaptations and visualizations across different media.
The original version of the D. W. is now archived, though still accessible online. The current 2.0 version, spearheaded by Pablo a Marca (Brown PhD, 2025), preserves the centrality of the text while enhancing it through data visualizations and interactive infographics. Building on the original XML encoding, the new platform enables searches based on key semantic elements such as person and place, together with their associated attributes—social role, origin, gender, religion, age, social status, marital condition, and other metadata relevant to the narrative structure of the work.
A second major development concerns the cataloguing and geolocation of places mentioned in the Decameron. Rather than relying on a proprietary GIS platform, the project implements a lightweight, open geographic information system: each toponym is geocoded against OpenStreetMap data and checked against the bounds of Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century narrative geography. This geocoded dataset underlies an interactive cartographic visualization of the text, built with the Leaflet JavaScript library: place markers are clustered, colour-coded and sized by citation frequency, and linked directly to the passages in which each place occurs. Geographic regions are themselves encoded as GeoJSON, rendered as togglable overlays on the map. A Keyhole Markup Language (KML) export of the same dataset additionally allows the Decameron’s narrative geography to be explored in Google Earth and other three-dimensional globe viewers.
A third feature currently under development is an experiment in what we call “bidirectional ekphrasis,” focused again on the garden as the symbolic and narrative frame of Boccaccio’s work. The emergence of LLMs and foundation models—such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama—opens new possibilities for textual and visual interpretation. Leveraging the capacity of these models to generate images from texts and texts from images, the project pursues two complementary goals: first, to identify previously unnoticed patterns within the vast archive of descriptions, translations, and visual representations of Decameron gardens; second, to generate new artificial visualizations of an aesthetically unprecedented kind.
We are also collaborating with a research team at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, led by Prof. Claudia Canali and Dr. Cecilia Marchetti, which is developing a customized model specifically trained for this task.
The Decameron Web 2.0 thus represents the continuation of a project begun more than three decades ago. Its founding inspiration remains unchanged: to place emerging technologies in the service of collaborative learning and scholarly exchange, for the benefit of the worldwide community of Decameron readers.