On the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death a little geomatics for the Divine Comedy

As we approach the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, this work seeks to examine his Comedy in its entirety, providing, in the frst instance, a statistical analysis of the places mentioned therein, and another dealing with the characters associated with these places. The analysis is intended to be exhaustive and includes those places, obviously less frequent, outside of Italy (in this regard, it should be remembered that Dante could not have had much greater knowledge of geography than that already condensed in Ptolemy’s Ecumene). To this end, groups of high school students were asked to read all the cantos of the three Canticles of which Dante’s Divine Comedy (by Dante Alighieri) is composed, and to prepare a list of the required data in a properly ordered list. Their dedication and painstaking eforts have provided an indispensable, unvaluable, and essential support for the creation of the database from which the statistical, graphical, and geomatic analyses that form the core of this paper are derived. Next, the variance analysis (performed using the Pearson correlation coefcient) and the connection analysis (performed with the Bonferroni indices) are presented, observing the absence of a law on the average behaviour of the variables treated and yet a not entirely random permutation (in contrast, the values of the correlation coeffcients display curious tendencies in Inferno and Paradiso, refecting Dante’s political ideas, while being almost non-existent in Purgatorio). Lastly, a network is created to organise the information fow between characters and places on the basis of the tables into which the data collected was placed. This network has a functional model similar to that of a levelling network, or a network of potential diferences or fows, in other disciplines (despite the obvious absence of observations and a stochastic-metrological model for them). The data collected are condensed into a series of anamorphic maps that facilitate their reading. The analysis as a whole does not seek to analyse the Divine Comedy but rather to highlight, from a statistical point of view, the rigour of Dante’s creation, in terms of its accuracy and reliability. On the other hand, from a geomatics point of view, the work does provide a further example of the possibilities ofered by geomatics applications that today are able to fnd uses in areas traditionally far removed from geomatics and applied geomatics, such as those of the human sciences.