Our next “field note” comes to us from a team based in Texas, but broadcasting around the world. K. Sarah-Jane Murray, a professor at Baylor University, and Courtney Becker, a Baylor alumna, describe their award-winning project Dante Minutes, a series of one-minute videos that introduce viewers to the essential cruxes of the poem, canto by canto. A novel public-facing project from The Greats Story Lab, Dante Minutes reminds us of the transformative power of both Dante’s poem and the digital media that enable new modes of access for enthusiastic publics.
K. Sarah-Jane Murray (Baylor University) with Courtney Becker
Field Notes / February 10, 2026
When we launched Dante Minutes in late October 2024, [1] we began with a simple question: How do we bring the Commedia alive—truly alive—for a world whose imagination is increasingly shaped by algorithms, short-form media, and a crisis of attention? [2] For a world filled with political division and existential uncertainty, where it increasingly feels like we have lost our way, like Dante in the dark wood? Could Dante’s poem speak at this decisive moment in history not only to scholars and experts, but also to anyone drowning in information yet starved for meaning?
One year and eight million views later, it is clear that the question was worth asking. The global audience—57 countries and counting—responded with a resounding “yes.” So did the media and storytelling communities: in 2025, Dante Minutes was awarded a gold Telly, given to the top 1-3% of media projects worldwide.
Before there was an audience, however, we leaned into our intuition as readers of Dante. For centuries, his Divine Comedy has endured not only because it is beautiful, but because it is formative. Dante set out to write a poem that would reshape and realign desire, purify vision, cultivate judgment, and heal the soul. [3] It is a masterwork of narrative craft, and a deliberate technology of moral transformation.
Today, as our age wrestles with the fragmentation of attention, the collapse of shared meaning, and the dominance of digital media that aims not to endure, but to distract, it is more challenging than ever for readers to enter and engage a text that demands contemplation, courage, and wonder. Yet our hunger for meaning has not vanished. Dante Minutes represents an attempt to meet that hunger. Today, as we approach Season 2 on Purgatorio for 2026, we remain fixed on the same question that drove the creation of Season 1: could we invite viewers into the same kind of transformative, immersive reading experience I have sought to cultivate in the college classroom over more than twenty years of teaching Dante?
- A Workflow Rooted in Digital Humanities (DH)
The Project began with a different kind of reading: not linear, but analytical. Drawing on my previous experience with The Charrette Project, an early humanities computing project at Princeton, [4] we built a workflow rooted in the digital humanities. We marked up the text for lexical patterns, metaphor clusters, poetic forms. We also tracked moments of morally consequential choice, those lines that prompted readers to examine their own conscience and lives. Our goal was not to produce a digital critical edition, but to surface the emotional and ethical architecture underlying each canto:
- Which lines carry Dante’s greatest moral pressure?
- Which images are crafted to linger?
- Which moments serve as hinges of transformation?
We call these “points of high emotional resonance,” the places where the narrative not only informs, but forms, the reader. These are the moments when Dante speaks the loudest across the centuries.
This DH analysis became the project’s backbone. Focusing on identified points of high emotional resonance, we crafted a one-minute script and designed the visual language and soundscapes for each Dante Minute around it. Each short video is a new form of DH output, the distillation of hours of scholarly analysis.
- Vertical Shorts as Modern Glosses
Although teaching motivated our experiment in the beginning, Dante Minutes was always about more than the classroom. We wanted to know if a medieval text could still ignite the moral imagination of a 21st-century audience saturated with digital noise.
Today’s attention economy could not be more different from Dante’s world. Some encounter the Commedia through video games or memes. Others only remember that they had to read the Inferno once, all too often in ways that did not inspire them. Meanwhile, the average person spends more than 13 hours a day consuming media and over 6.5 hours daily on internet-connected screens. [5]
We wanted to test whether Dante’s wisdom could speak within the mediums that dominate our imaginative lives today. Could a sixty-second vertical video function as a sort of manuscript gloss? Not as a replacement for the text, but as a gateway: an invitation to (re)turn to the text with clearer sight, perhaps even for the first time.
The response suggests the answer is yes.
We are often asked why we chose vertical shorts as the format, since the format itself is often blamed for the collapse of attention spans. Our reasoning was simple:
- Vertical shorts meet viewers where they already dwell. If Dante were writing today, we believe he would be at the forefront of immersive storytelling. In 2025, vertical shorts dominated the global media landscape. [6] We chose to inhabit the space where audiences, especially young ones, spend the most time.
- Constraints sharpen clarity. One of my mentors in film and animation, Phil Roman, taught me that constraints do not hamper creativity, they sharpen it. The one-minute limit required us to ask: which moment from this canto carries its moral DNA? What can we say that will reveal its essence, not dilute it?
- Vertical video slips past the “watchful dragons.” In a 1956 article in the New York Times, C.S. Lewis wrote that “fairytales,” because they are unassuming, slip past the “watchful dragons” of cynicism and defensiveness. [7] Our age has its own dragons—fragmentation, doomscrolling, and an ever-increasing consumerist vision of learning—that result in what I call “the wisdom recession.” A world in which we have seemingly infinite access to information, but lack the ability to understand, retain, and apply it to our own lives. We chose to inhabit the very medium that has fragmented our attention, with the view to re-enchanting it as a space for wonder and contemplation.
- Crafting an Immersive Storyscape for Dante Today
Visually, Dante Minutes developed its own grammar that mirrors contemplative reading and listening. We wanted to help viewers have ears to hear and eyes to see, a principle popularized amongst medieval poets via Augustine’s approach to reading in On Christian Doctrine, one of the seminal texts of the Middle Ages. [8]
- Slow zooms on public domain artwork (including Gustave Doré), evoking a quiet, slow approach to reading;
- Manuscript images that ground viewers in the materiality of medieval reading;
- Immersive soundscapes that bring Inferno’s winds, flames, and the beating wings of Geryon alive;
- Vertical tilts that mimic ascent and descent;
- Nods to the birth of Italian cinema, including footage from Milano Films’ 1911 Inferno. The worlds of moving images and deep, thought-provoking literature were once closely tied in the mainstream, popular imagination.
At every step, we did not seek to modernize Dante. Rather, our aim was to reveal the enduring emotional grammar of the Commedia itself, in a format today’s audiences instinctively understand. Our job is in many ways to render what has become invisible, visible.
- The Recovery of Wonder
In its first year, Dante Minutes accumulated nearly 8 million views on YouTube and over 20,000 subscribers. Students who viewed Season 1: Inferno as part of their coursework at Baylor University, and others who reached out via social media, described the experience as transformational:
- “This is the first time the Inferno felt real to me.”
- “I finally understand why Dante matters.”
- “This made me return to the text with fresh eyes.”
For us, the metric that matters most was never the view count, but the return to the primary text. The series has proven that Dante’s vision still reaches the general public when it is transformed into a visual and emotional language they already speak.
Ultimately, Dante Minutes is both a digital-humanities and public-humanities project. It reaffirms what teachers of Dante have always known: the Commedia does not belong only to specialists. In a digital culture that so often trades speed for substance, Dante Minutes opens up a contemplative doorway, offering to viewers an accessible yet serious path into a transformative text.
As we look forward to Season 2: Purgatorio in 2026, our DH markup is expanding to track the poetics of ascent, virtue-vice reorientation, the grammar of Hope, and the slow schooling of desire. If Inferno exposes disordered love, Purgatorio gives us a vision of love healed.
Conclusion
The success of Dante Minutes does not belong to us. It belongs to Dante, as well as all those who have labored to keep his poem alive across the centuries. Long ago, he already knew something about human beings that our digital age struggles to remember: that we are shaped deeply by the stories that take root in our hearts and memory.
Our experiment confirms what we already sensed: Dante’s wisdom can still travel. Across the ages, it consoles, convicts, provokes, and guides modern audiences. And it still awakens our imaginations—even in a vertical frame on a phone screen, one minute at a time.
[1] https://DanteMinutes.org and https://m.youtube.com/@GreatsStoryLab. Last accessed November 20, 2025.
[2] Johann Harri, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Focus and How to Think Deeply Again (New York: Crown, 2022).
[3] See George Corbett, Dante’s Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[4] https://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/ss/. Last accessed November 20, 2025.
[5] “The latest figures suggest that the average person spends upwards of 40% of their waking hours on an internet-connected screen.” See Fabio Duarte, “Alarming Average Screen Time Statistics.” https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats. Last accessed November 20, 2025.
[6] “Popularity of Online Short-Form Content Moving Beyond Social Media.” https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/popularity-of-online-short-form-content-moving-beyond-social-media. Last accessed November 20, 2025. In 2024, microdramas (with episodes typically lasting 1 minute) surpassed the Chinese domestic box office sales for the first time. See “MIPCOM 2025: Short-Vertical Content, the New Language of Young (and Not-So-Young Generations),” https://senalnews.com/en/interviews/mipcom-2025-short-vertical-content-the-new-language-of-young-and-not-so-young-generations. Last accessed November 20, 2025.
[8] C.S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairytales Say Best What Needs to Be Said,” https://www.nytimes.com/1956/11/18/archives/sometimes-fairy-stories-may-say-best-whats-to-be-said.html. Last accessed November 20, 2025.
[8] Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.S. Robertson (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1958).