Interview

Dante Today: Where The Medieval Meets The Digital

Nicola Guida, University of Pennsylvania

NG: What inspired the creation of Dante Today? Was there a particular gap or need you hoped to fill in Dante Studies?

AS: I (Arielle) began teaching at Bowdoin in 1999. I taught my first Dante course in 2000 and quickly I was bombarded by students, colleagues, friends, and family telling me about Dante-related, Dante-adjacent, Dante-inspired things they had come across. The internet was still new, and so most of what I received were newspaper and magazine clippings, film titles and TV episodes scribbled on napkins, and photographs (not digital ones!). I kept everything in a filing cabinet, fascinated by how present Dante continued to be in modern culture—in America no less. I started imagining what to do with all these “sightings” and “citings” I had sitting there, where no one could see them but me.

The first thing I did was curate a small exhibit at the Bowdoin Museum of Art called “Cut, Oiled, and Shot,” which displayed early printed books and engravings (cut), paintings (oiled), film clips and video (shot) inspired by the Commedia and held in Bowdoin’s book and art collections. The contemporary pieces intrigued my students the most (e.g., Rauschenberg’s Inferno and BBC’s TV Dante) and I thought again of my cabinet of mostly twentieth-century Dante “artefacts” (another word we use for sightings/citings). About a year later I met the Boston artist Paul Laffoley (1935-2015), who did an extraordinary triptych of the Comedy in the mid-1970s. I knew I had to write about him and his work. So many artists, writers, musicians, and creators of all kinds were out there, I thought, doing work inspired by Dante and were not known, not being discussed in scholarship, not available to students and readers of the Commedia and Dante’s other works.

I began talking with Bowdoin’s IT department about whether we could create an online archive that focused on contemporary sightings/citings of Dante. It would be open to submissions—crowdsourced in that sense—but curated: a repository for everything from the highest of brow to the poppiest of culture. It would be a place for scholars and students to observe and study how Dante and his works resonate with people today. It took a few years to build, not just because WordPress was limited and clunky back then, but because we had a lot of thinking to do about how to digitize, categorize, and organize the current data, as well as plan for the influx of future data. By 2006, we had a prototype.

As the web developed in leaps and bounds, it became clear that so much more could be done with this archive than I had initially thought. It could offer a bibliography of scholarly research on Dante reception, it could have a map showing where the sightings had originated, it could have a mosaic of striking Dante-related images. Bit by bit the site grew, submissions rolled in—even without any advertisement or social media. Bowdoin student assistants helped post the new sightings/citings during the semester and as full-time jobs in the summer (you can see every assistant’s name who worked on the site on the About page). And then, in 2012, at a conference, I met a brilliant Stanford graduate student, Beth Coggeshall, who had just taught a course on Dante’s modern and contemporary afterlives and was overflowing with ideas about what else the site could do and be. After a few conversations, I asked if she would like to be my co-editor. We have been working together on the site for almost 15 years now, and I could not have dreamed up a better collaborator. So many innovations in the overhaul of the site, which we completed in 2024 with Rainwater Studio as the design team and the Local Robot development studio, are Beth’s, and there are more to come, but I will let her tell you of those!

BC: Arielle already said most of it, but I’ll add two points: first of all, that the site remains unique in the landscape of projects dedicated to the contemporary reception of literary texts. I have yet to find a Homer, Shakespeare, or Austen project that also catalogues the ways that those authors’ works spread in contemporary culture in the ways that our project does. In some ways, Arielle’s intuition was a straightforward (and repeatable!) one—to track the global resonance of Dante’s works across contemporary cultures, especially in the popular realm. And yet, nearly twenty years later, to my knowledge it remains the only one of its kind.

The second point I would add is that, as humanists, we have few opportunities for genuine collaboration with other researchers. We tend to write books alone, to read and research alone. We might exchange ideas at conferences or in informal exchanges, but we don’t have to negotiate meaning within our own projects unless we take part in collaborative research. I have learned much from working with Arielle: we complement one another’s work—she gravitates toward deep dives into a single artist’s body of work, especially in the visual arts, while I enjoy trying to take stock of our data in the aggregate—and we shape one another’s approaches to reading and writing about Dante’s resonance. We also collaborate with teams of people—students especially, but also digital humanities librarians, IT specialists, designers, etc.—at each of our institutions, and we invite our audience into the project as researchers, too, through crowdsourcing. The collaborative aspects of this project open it up to becoming a space of learning and growth for all those involved.

NG: The website states its mission is to provide data to reflect on the afterlife of Dante’s works through the lenses of theory, resonance, and cultural studies. In what ways has Dante Today fulfilled this mission so far? What outcomes or impacts has the project achieved? Have you received any feedback from instructors or students regarding its use or influence?

BC: Researchers often think of our site as their first stop on a journey through Dante’s contemporary global resonance. If you’re writing an article on Dante in the performing arts, let’s say, our site is a great place to begin. We also maintain a bibliography—not exhaustive, but extensive and always growing—of scholarly resources that trace Dante’s resonance across genres, languages, and topics. Because the scholarly landscape is always changing, we maintain a live, public Zotero library that we edit frequently, adding sources to the bibliography as we become aware of them. I find this to be one of the more highly impactful services we provide, certainly for my own research and for that of my students.

We regularly hear from instructors and students (both in high schools and in Higher Ed) who utilize Dante Today in their classrooms. Some colleagues, like Daniela D’Eugenio at the University of Arkansas or a literature teacher at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida, have assigned their students the task of locating new references. Others, like Homer Twigg at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, submit their students’ original work to our site for us to post. In addition to instructors and students, we hear directly from artists, musicians, directors, writers, curators, and marketing teams, who submit their work to the site for us to document. The conversations and collaborations that arise from these submissions are some of the most rewarding aspects of the research.

The site is unique in its approach to Dante’s afterlives. In the space of the archive, we do not offer extensive commentary on any one sighting or another; we leave this responsibility to our users. We see our role primarily as that of archivists who curate a collection of materials for researchers to sift through and make sense of, according to their own theoretical frameworks and methodologies. We have amassed over 2,200 artifacts in the process, and our tagging system—especially following the 2024 relaunch—permits users to dig into the data in ways that we hope assist them with their research projects and encourage further pursuits. Our work as archivists, however, will never be complete: the landscape of Dante’s resonance is constantly changing as new artifacts are designed and older ones are discovered.

NG: As specified in the footer, the site is crowdsourced. Do you however use any criteria when selecting references to feature?

BC: The fact that the site is crowdsourced is one of our favorite features of the project. Crowdsourcing our submissions brings us into contact with unpredictable publics that constantly reinvigorate our enthusiasm for the work that we’re doing, whether they’re students, artists, or just fellow fans of Dante’s poem. Outside of our own idiosyncratic research initiatives and interests, crowdsourcing has been the primary mechanism we have used for growing the archive, and it has been that way since the beginning. I find it fascinating that the site’s creation coincided with the coining of the term “crowdsource” in 2006. I think that’s telling of the spirit with which Arielle set out on the project in the first place. We have always sought to welcome a wide range of publics into the discussion, offering their own suggestions for inclusion in the archive and bringing new “Dantes” to our attention.

But, you’re right, there are also criteria for selection (this is why we also insist that the site is “curated,” not only crowdsourced). By curating submissions, we mean that we assess carefully whether an artifact is genuinely a reference to Dante or not. A propane torch marketed as “Inferno” is likely not a reference to Dante. Neither is an arbitrary reference to “The Devil” or “Virgil,” who have their own afterlives outside of the world of the poem. In some cases, we will debate the question among ourselves: occasionally a contributor will offer a submission that makes a connection that one of us finds tenuous, and we will discuss—sometimes at length—whether we feel like the case can be made. Of course, our users might disagree with our assessment!

One aspect of curation that I have given a lot of thought to is that it gives us, as curators, the opportunity to seek out contributions that might be less evident to the “crowd.” I wrote about this in an essay for Bibliotheca Dantesca in 2022: In our case, our audience skews North American and Western European. If we want to showcase Dante’s global resonance, it is up to us as curators to seek out artifacts from outside the dominant regions that our userbase represents, and to cultivate collaborations with contributors who can help us in that mission.

NG: The field of digital humanities is rapidly changing and developing alongside technology. What digital tools, platforms, or workflows do you deem essential to make sure that Dante Today is keeping up with such advancements?

BC: The site has been platformed on WordPress since its inception. WordPress was developed primarily as a blogging platform, and this has helped us in a couple of important ways: first, WordPress has an extremely user-friendly interface that keeps the backend of the site very easy to maintain, especially when we are collaborating with different students from year to year, who do much of the posting and assist us with basic site upkeep. Second, because of its blogging design, WordPress has a built-in familiarity to it that welcomes in users both inside and outside academia. It is a friendly platform that we hope gives us an approachable site.

One of the difficulties of using such a streamlined platform is that WordPress does the work of storing the data for you; you don’t need to keep a separate .csv or other data file that would feed the data into the site. This is great until you actually need the raw data, as we discovered when we decided to migrate the site to a new URL in 2024. We had never kept a list of our tags or developed a taxonomy of those tags, for example, so when we decided to revamp the site we had to reverse-engineer those data from scratch—and by hand. It was a laborious process, and one that made us rethink our workflow.

WordPress is also constantly evolving. Features on the site occasionally break or lose functionality when WordPress completes an update that doesn’t play nicely with our theme or its plugins. This became a major issue when we had to transfer servers after Arielle’s move from Bowdoin to Johns Hopkins University. Many of the features on the site broke in the move. This was the impetus to hire the amazing creative team at Studio Rainwater and the phenomenal web designers at Local Robot to collaborate with us to build the new site, which we launched in late 2024.

The last thing I will note about WordPress is that because it began as a blogging platform, it works very well for platforming a digital archive, where data are organized into separate “posts” that give the user a sense of what’s contained in the collection. One area where we see potential for growth is in developing an area of the site where we could take the user on a “deep dive” of some of the archival materials. I like to say that we think of our collection as akin to the holdings of a museum. The museum identifies general patterns or broad groupings of its artifacts, just as we do with our tagging system. But a museum might also have a gallery space where a curator could organize a subset of the artifacts into a different configuration and tell a new story with them. Or they could select one artifact to feature, telling its story in greater depth. We have plans to build a virtual “gallery” space within the existing architecture of our site, so that we can make visible some of the invisible narratives in our collection and offer our users new ways of seeing.

AS: We keep on top of the many, many Dante-related DH sites that are out there, as well as keep our eyes out for sites that are similar to ours, that is, archives that can be used for research and teaching. WordPress—and the many plug-ins and modifications our IT team has added to it—has been a great platform for the site. It has a relatively intuitive format and it is easy to train our assistants to use it.

We have been fortunate to receive extensive financial and technical support from Bowdoin and Hopkins, as well as Stanford and Florida State. We will be applying for more funding to do a social media blitz, advertising, and outreach for the site, which we have never done. We would also like to be regularly hooked into social media, devise an ever quicker way to post artefacts that come in, as well as develop tools that could speed up and automate other tasks.

NG: Contemporary adaptations of classical literature take many forms, from cinema and video games to newer and emerging technologies like AI. What are the risks or warnings of such media when approaching classics? And what does Dante Today do to face possible challenges?

AS: I am not sure yet how AI will impact this site. It might help us locate more Dante artefacts around the world, but it cannot do what most submissions we receive do: revel in the excitement of discovery, which people always express when they send something in. It is like treasure hunting—it is something you saw or found.

BC: I’m not sure that we see new and emerging technologies as presenting challenges or risks to the classics. In fact, Arielle and I both see contemporary adaptations as enriching the “resonance” of the text, a term put forward by Wai Chee Dimock in a beautiful article in PMLA (“A Theory of Resonance,” 1997). When creatives across various media reimagine a “classic,” Dimock would say that they come at it “tangentially and tendentiously,” and that their approaches to texts don’t diminish the original sound of these texts—they enrich it. Across time, resonance “thickens their tonality.” As scholars whose work is invested in understanding not only what Dante meant to his contemporaries at the time but also—and, for me, more importantly—to us now in our contemporary moments and places, we welcome this resonance. We seek it out.

NG: Moving on to more personal questions, what is your favorite example of Dante in contemporary culture that you have learned precisely thanks to Dante Today?

AS: I have a few: Donna Di Stefano’s “Love that Moves the Sun and the Other Stars” ring, Kazumasa Chiba’s Dante paintings and sculptures, Kat Mustatea’s performance piece Voidopolis, Maru Ceballos’s illustrations, and Kremo’s Sonora Commedia (a compilation of 100 electronic music pieces composed by thirty-three musicians for each of the poem’s cantos). I have written about these creators after having met and interviewed all of them in person, except for Ceballos (we have only talked via Zoom). There are so many other people doing incredible adaptations of Dante’s poem or tributes to him with whom I or my students have corresponded. It is a privilege and honor to have front-row seats to so many kinds of creative production and such deep and diverse thinking about Dante.

BC: I completely agree with that. Some of the most thrilling moments of my career—both as a researcher and as a teacher—have been exchanges with creatives whose work I know about because I have my ear to the ground, looking for new ways contemporary artists are approaching and adapting the poem. Most of my recent exchanges have been with poets: Lorna Goodison and Mary Jo Bang, both of whom have generously given their time to speak with my students; Kimberly Campanello, whom I met in the UK this summer; John Robert Lee, with whom I just started corresponding a few weeks ago. These poets and translators have re-vivified the poem for me and my students in ways for which I am extremely grateful.

In terms of my favorite artifacts on the site, though, I should also mention the clusters of Dante-related “memes” we are collecting. I am writing a book on the subject now, so that I can make sense of the various ways Dante and his works spread across the surface of contemporary culture, even among those who have never read the poem. This has always fascinated me!

NG: Has working on Dante Today changed the way you read Dante? And what about the ways you teach Dante in class?

AS: Yes to both, and the site continues to alter my reading and teaching each year that passes. Seeing the countless ways people read/understand/relate to Dante reminds me how powerful Dante’s words were, even if just as an echo or as a humorous meme. Observing how a master goldsmith zooms in on the gemstones and metals mentioned in the Comedy, for example, has inspired me to read about precious materials in medieval Italy and art of smithing to better understand how and why Dante invokes these items and that trade. Learning that a rapper (GM Grimm) read the Commedia in prison and then wrote Digital Tears: E-Mail from Purgatory (2004) reminds me to focus on the hope for change that canticle offers. The same goes for teaching. Dante Today keeps me grounded in why the poem matters—why it mattered to Dante, to his early readers, to scholars, and to people of all walks of life for centuries. Even the most superficial or odd use of Dante keeps an electric current flowing and Dante alive.

BC: I teach the poem in two classes at Florida State University. In one class—an advanced UG/MA seminar—we look directly at the adaptations and appropriations of Dante’s works in the contemporary world, primarily in the twenty-first century. Obviously here Dante Today shapes my classroom experience, as do my students, who bring artifacts to my attention that I hadn’t seen or known before. The process of discovery is exciting for all of us.

But I think my other course is the one that draws the most influence from my thirteen years of working on and thinking about Dante today. My other class is a large undergraduate course that satisfies FSU’s general education requirement in “Ethics.” When I teach the poem in this context, the students and I have to meditate on what Dante’s poem has to teach us about how we live our lives today: not in some obscure and distant past that we have to excavate, but right here and now. The work we do on Dante Today keeps me attuned to these questions in ways that I can bring to that classroom, so we might think about how Inferno 26, for example, might resonate differently for a student-veteran—who knows what it is like to return home, battle-weary, alongside a small company of “frati”—than it would for a student who comes from a culture that deeply values filial piety and familial duty. We always discuss Inferno 5 alongside contemporary pop songs about love, asking ourselves what assumptions our culture makes about desire and how we uncritically adopt some of those same assumptions, just like Francesca does. These are the conversations that I value the most in that classroom, and they come from my experience living with Dante’s contemporary resonance for so long.

NG: In what ways could a comprehensive data analysis of the global contributions to Dante Today illuminate the contemporary dynamics of Dante’s transnational reception? Has the website revealed, or could potentially disclose, new patterns in how Dante’s work is being reinterpreted, adapted or even appropriated across different cultures and media landscapes today?

BC: To be honest, I don’t think we will ever wrap our heads fully around that question, in particular the transnational piece of it. Arielle and I are up-front with our users about the fact that the archive is always in development. We acknowledge that we are Americans working in an American context. Our networks are primarily centered in North America and Europe (although we are both expanding beyond those regions, reaching out and cultivating relationships with scholars in Latin America, East Asia, and South Africa, in particular). Between us, we speak a few languages, but, even with automatic translation, we are limited in the linguistic reach we have outside of English- and Romance-language contexts. So one of the greatest challenges of the site is that it could never fully represent a statistically accurate, comprehensive global picture of Dante’s transnational reception. For us, it matters deeply that this is a human initiative, not one that’s run by artificial intelligence or automated analytical tools—even as those become more sophisticated and could probably do this work with exceptional rigor and reach. As we’ve discussed here, the community-building, public-oriented, collaborative aspects of the project have always been the most valuable aspects of it.

NG: Thank you both for your time and the work you’re doing with this amazing project.

BC: And thank you, Nicola, for the opportunity to share it with the readers of Bibliotheca Dantesca!