Projects

The RIND Project

Reading the Italian Novel at a Distance (1830-1930)

The cccc package has been developed within the RIND Project - Research INtelligence Development, coordinated by the University of Trieste.

The RIND project is an interdisciplinary research initiative that combines methods and perspectives from computational and corpus linguistics, quantitative literary studies, data science, statistics, and translation studies.

Building on Franco Moretti’s seminal approach to distant reading, the project aims to conduct large-scale quantitative analyses on a corpus of approximately 1.000 Italian novels and short story collections, including Italian translations from other languages, published between 1830 and 1930.
The corpus is carefully balanced to account for the distribution of authors and translators, gender, publication date, text length, and the distinction between canonical and non-canonical literature.

Objectives

RIND pursues two main research goals:

  1. Analyzing how literary characters express thoughts and emotions, through quantitative and automatic extraction methods that capture pragma-linguistic phenomena emerging beyond the boundaries of words and sentences.
  2. Tracing social change in Italian novels by exploring lexical fields related to professions, military ranks, religious titles, buildings (residential, commercial, industrial, religious, rural, urban, etc.), and other domains that reflect transformations in society.

Both objectives are innovative, as few studies have applied quantitative and computational methods to the analysis of reported discourse or to the periodization of Italian literary prose using criteria independent from traditional literary criticism.
The comparison between original Italian works and translations will also shed light on the influence of foreign models on Italian literary prose.

Methodological Framework

The project draws on three main disciplinary pillars:

  • Linguistics, to identify morphological and syntactic features leading to pragmatic patterns and lexical lists, and to map their diachronic evolution across semantic domains.
  • Statistics and Machine Learning, to classify texts through topic modeling, content analysis, word embeddings, time series extraction, and advanced data visualization techniques.
  • Literary and Comparative Studies, to interpret results within the historical and cultural contexts of Italian, European, and global literature from Realism to Modernism.

Contribution

By integrating linguistic, literary, and statistical expertise, the RIND project seeks to provide both a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of literary language and cultural evolution.
Its results will enhance our understanding of how language and society co-evolved in Italian prose during a century of profound artistic and social transformation.

Visit the project page: https://rind.units.it/home/