From Codex to ChatBot: Antonio Morosini, a Digital Reconstruction of a Venetian Historical Voice

This thesis investigates the methodological conditions under which Artificial Intelligence can be employed as a tool for historical interrogation without delegating to it the interpretation of the past. Focusing on the Codex Morosini (1094--1433), a late medieval Venetian chronicle of extraordinary informational density, the research explores how a Large Language Model can be integrated into a rigorously constrained digital environment grounded exclusively in a single historical source. The study first reinterprets the Chronica of Antonio di Marco Morosini as a premodern information system structured through networks of places, institutions, actors, and events. Building upon computational analysis and semantic retrieval techniques, it then develops a controlled conversational interface -ChatBot Morosini -designed to enable structured interrogation of the corpus while preserving documentary fidelity, temporal coherence, and epistemological transparency. Rather than positioning Artificial Intelligence as an interpretative authority, the project conceptualizes it as a mediated interface operating under explicit methodological safeguards: corpus restriction, retrieval-based generation, response control, and enforced non-response in cases of anachronism or documentary silence. The system does not produce autonomous historical synthesis; instead, it reorganizes and returns linguistically grounded segments of the source, maintaining the historian's central role in interpretation. By combining historiographical analysis, computational modeling, and conversational design, this thesis demonstrates that Artificial Intelligence can extend the possibilities of historical inquiry only when embedded within transparent, reproducible, and critically controlled workflows. The passage from Codex to ChatBot thus represents not a technological substitution of the historian, but a methodological reformulation of access to historical memory. Finally, the thesis outlines the subsequent development of the project toward digital embodiment, through an interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at designing a historically grounded virtual avatar of Morosini. This extension does not alter the epistemological framework established in the present study, but explores how controlled historical mediation may intersect with emerging forms of interactive and visual interface design.