The Divine Comedy as a Complex System

The paper extends Digital Humanities (DH) analyses of literary texts by applying Complex Systems analysis techniques to Dante Alighieri’s poem The Divine Comedy. First, we present some background concerning DH and Dante’s work, framing our narrative in a context of “multilingual digital humanities”. The paper then applies three different analysis methodologies to the text that are typical of Complex Systems: network, statistical, and entropy analysis. By applying these techniques, we identify relationships between words, assess linguistic diversity, and quantify the predictability of word sequences in the poem. These findings contribute to the growing field of multilingual DH scholarship and further highlight the potential of computational methodologies for the analysis of literary texts.