Using Time Series and Graphs in the Analysis of Dante's Divine Comedy

The digitized form of a literary work can be used to have a numerical analysis of it, for instance, by giving the frequencies of words occurring in the text and a consequent appraisal of characters, places or leitmotivs to which these words are linked. The related numerical data can also be organized and analysed as time series, where the time is played by the progression of lines of the digitized text. Here we propose examples of time series concerning some words in Dante Alighieri’s poem, the Divine Comedy. Besides plotting the time series, we can also use graphs for illuminating some leitmotivs of this poem.