Feelings and the Roman house: A sentiment analysis of Pompeian graffiti

Abstract

This article introduces a new digital method for studying Roman domestic spaces: sentiment analysis. The first objective is to test how sentiment analysis can be used to study Roman graffiti, while the second is to examine what the results reveal about the functions of the Roman and Pompeian house and people's behavior within it. The article focuses on one house in Pompeii, the Casa delle nozze d'argento (V,2,i), which offers a well-documented context for the purposes of this work. The article combines the study of textual and material sources and introduces new innovative methods for studying life in the ancient world.

The use of sentiment analysis as a tool makes it possible to identify sentiments via computational methods, where the text is provided with values that define its sentiment polarity. Pompeian graffiti has not been previously studied using this method. Additionally, the article makes use of Space Syntax analysis – a mathematical tool used to calculate the relationships between rooms and spaces – to assess how the results of the sentiment analysis correlate with the visibility of the graffiti and their makers. Such an analysis will provide information on the location of negative, neutral, and positive examples of graffiti in relation to the scale of public and private spaces in the Casa delle nozze d'argento.