The Decameron Web began as the WWW "translation" of a Storyspace document which was created by a group of graduate and undergraduate students in Italian Studies at Brown University during the academic year 1994-1995, under the direction of Prof. Massimo Riva. Since 1995, the project has been run by a two-editor team: Prof. Riva and Prof. Michael Papio (Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst). In 1998, the Advisory and Editorial Boards were established to guide the further growth of the Decameron Web. In the late spring of 1999, the project was awarded a two-year grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was at this time that we gained a new Project Director, Michael Hemment (Harvard and Brown), who managed the daily operations of the Web in close collaboration with Prof. Riva and Prof. Papio. In 2001 Cristiana Fordyce took over this job and directed the growth of the project throughout our second NEH grant, making significant improvements. In 2003-2005 the title passed to Vika Zafrin, Brown M.A. in Italian Studies and Ph.D. in Humanities Computing, who later went on to become an Institutional Repository Librarian at Boston University.
Since the project's inception, it has made substantial progress. There are now well over 300 documents and dozens of images, all designed to provide our visitors with an easily navigable site and abundant information related to the study of Boccaccio's masterpiece. Though the project was originally produced as a multimedia resource for students here at Brown, it soon became apparent that teachers and students around the world were benefiting from its materials. In response to this demand, we began a series of improvements and additions which, we hope, will make it even more useful to a wide range of users. This expansion is of course an endless endeavor and we depend upon the feedback of our visitors to guide us in the project's growth.
You Can Add to The Decameron Web
This collection of materials will continue to grow in years to come, as students and scholars at Brown University and other institutions contribute syllabi, successful teaching strategies, new essays, interpretations, images, and so forth. A list of past and current contributors is already available. As contributions are received, the author's name and a list of works cited are added to the project simultaneously. We invite our readers to improve the quality of our site by sending us feedback and information.
Please send your suggestions, corrections, ideas for links, or new materials to Massimo Riva or Michael Papio.
