We perform digital analysis on literary texts not to answer questions, but to generate questions. The questions digital analysis can answer are generally not ‘interesting’ in a humanist sense: but the questions digital analysis provokes often are. And these questions have to be answered by ‘traditional’ literary methods. Here’s an example. Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, head […]
Author Archives: Jonathan Hope
What happens in Hamlet?
Posted in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare
Tagged Farah Karim-Cooper, Hamlet, log likelihood, pronoun I, Wordhoard
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Shakespeare’s mythic vocabulary – and his invisible grammar
Universities in the UK are under pressure to demonstrate the ‘impact’ of their research. In many ways, this is fair enough: public taxes account for the vast majority of UK University income, so it is reasonable for the public to expect academics to attempt to communicate with them about their work. University press offices have […]
The very strange language of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I just got back from a fun and very educative trip to Shakespeare’s Globe in London, hosted by Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, who is director of research there. The Globe stages an annual production aimed at schools (45,000 free tickets have been distributed over the past five years), and this year’s play is A Midsummer Night’s […]
Why the Difference? Accounting for Variation between the Folio and Globe Editions of Shakespeare’s Plays
To what extent is modern text analysis software capable of dealing with historical data? This is a perennial question asked by those working with digitized historical texts who wish to see how an analysis of such texts can be facilitated by cutting-edge technologies. No doubt the best way to answer the question is to test […]
Posted in Uncategorized
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The comic ‘I’ and the tragic ‘we’?
In our Shakespeare Quarterly paper, we used Docuscope to come up with a description of Shakespeare’s comic language which centres on the rapid exchange of singular pronouns: I/you and my/your. We claimed there that Shakespearean comedies typically involve people arguing about things, striving to arrive at a ‘we’ of agreement, but not being able to […]
Posted in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare
Tagged comedies, I, log likelihood, pronouns, tragedies, Twelfth Night, we, Wordhoard, you
6 Responses