Constellate

Image credit: screen capture of the Constellate dashboard for data set  a3740182-8a9a-5c8a-74f5-c4b4f27351b7 (accessed June 6, 2023).

Constellate is a suite of text mining tools that connects to JSTOR resources among others. Users can create custom corpora, see trends in the data using ITHAKA's dashboard of tools, and use Python for text mining in a JupyterLab environment. Constellate provides Jupyter notebooks for working with a sample of 1,500 articles; users can provide their own notebooks. Alternatively, in accordance with the terms of service, users can download and analyze data with their own workflows.

After several variations to assess the scope of secondary scholarship on the Orlando furioso, we searched Constellate for the following:

Dates were as inclusive as possible: 1850-2023. Since Constellate includes a unique identifier for each article, we were able to exclude duplicates across the searches. Of the 4,089 articles that matched our search for "Orlando furioso" AND poem, 1850-2023, 3,134 lacked key phrase metadata.

Of the 552 articles that matched our search for "Orlando furioso" AND poema, 1850-2023, none had key phrase metadata.

Results for the moon analysis will use these 4,641 articles.

Overview

The “TopTermsInEnglishArticles” document provides insight into the most frequently used terms in scholarship on the Orlando furioso. Frequency of terms is an appropriate way to measure the “centers” of the scholarship, as the terms that are cited most often are likely to be the most pervasive and important themes of the scholarship. In a first pass of the data, “women” (5482 mentions) and “love” (3985) immediately jump out as aligning with what feels like important elements of the poem from a single read-through, while terms such as “renaissance” (7398), “literature” (6990) and “Italian” (6528) seem to contextualize the poem within the broader western literary and poetic corpus.  The terms “translation” (3445 mentions), “power” (2409), “romance” (2221), and “war” (1757) to be representative of some of the main scholarly themes. As we have discussed in class, translation discrepancies might change the intended meaning of a phrase or story in the poem, and the decisions of the translator have a large impact on our understanding of the Furioso. Similarly, notions of “power” and “war” are embedded into the military battles detailed throughout the poem. Finally, romance is a central motivator of many of the characters and Ariosto often recounts his own struggles with love to the audience.

While themes of gender, love, and chivalry seem to provide fruitful starting points for our own inquiries into the poem, it is these latter terms (along with mentions of Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante) that we should briefly address here. Using these terms as starting points for searches within various catalogues leads to a trove of articles that do not examine the Furioso on its own, but rather in comparison to or in the broader context of other works. Interestingly, we can see here how the Furioso itself can be considered fringe, either as a point of comparison and inspiration for other works or as a stepping stone between other epic poems (Sims 1997; Wooten 1982). Despite its influence and popularity among notable Italian writers and thinkers, from Galileo to Calvino, Ariosto and the Furioso seem to occupy an interesting position in both the timeline and popular imagination of the history of Italian literature; while notable, Ariosto falls just outside the inner circle of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, occupying a more transitory period between these writers and later epic literature.[1] In the Italian articles that matched the search "Orlando furioso" AND poema, Dante's name appears twice as many times as Ariosto's! Even Boccaccio (486) and Petrarch (476) appear slightly more often than Ariosto (456). Before we interrogate the fringes within the poem, we must keep in mind the fringe that the Furioso itself occupies.

Credit to Jack Olcott and Bram Hollis for most of these observations.

[1] As another brief example, a Google Scholar search for “dante boccaccio petrarch” renders about 29,000 results, while adding ariosto or substituting him for any of the scholars pulls the results down to between 10,000 and 15,000.