finanziamento PRIN

This project aims to build a map of primary emotions (according to the most widespread psychological classifications, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) from Roman times to modern ones, with attention to different fields. A first step will be the construction of a lexicon of passions, in the form of a specialized handbook. This lexicon will be focused on Roman culture and its reception in Medieval and modern thought until the XVIIIth century, and enriched by images of ancient art and archaeology from the Museo Nazionale Romano. The two outputs of the project will be a research monograph (printed and published online in open access in PDF format) and a multimedia online resource integrating texts, images and other artworks from the Museo Nazionale Romano, tagged semantically on the basis of the primary emotions listed above. This digital resource will be available both on the web and as an app for mobile devices. Users – including both specialists and the general public – will be able to interactively navigate this web of cultural products spanning through different arts, cultures and centuries tagged semantically on the basis of the primary emotions listed above. Thanks to a net of hyperlinks generated dynamically from the semantic tagging of elements in the back-end database, each visitor will be able to build his/her own path from a passion to another, choosing to deepen information about a single text/author/artwork, and so on, and to switch from, say, surprise to happiness and love. It will be also possible to try the reverse path, from an artwork/text/word to the corresponding passion. PATHOS (PATHs Of the Soul. An atlas of ancient emotions) will produce an open access publication and a digital resource, accessible as a website and through a mobile app. In this way, the result of the project will be useful at different levels: to scholars, for specialized thematic researches; to teachers, to find materials for didactic purposes, and to students and a wider audience to find the ancient keywords, texts, and artworks corresponding to their daily mood. A real-world spinoff of the project will be the arranging of informative panels in the sites of Museo Nazionale Romano, in which the emotion expressed by the artwork is highlighted, with reference to the peculiar gesture/detail/facial expression related to it, and to selected passages about it. This may offer the visitors new ways of enjoying ancient art, with the chance of creating one's own path between, say, 'happy' artworks. The project is designed for a two year work, but it is easily expandable both on the synchronic and the diachronic axis, i.e. either to secondary emotions, or to other cultures and ages.