These two visualizations spark two interesting questions: What do people read during a revolution? What is the connection between what people read and political events? Both images spike dramatically around moments of upheaval in the Western World: The English, American, and French Revolutions, the mid-19th-century Europe-wide overthrow of governments, and World War I, to name […]
Category Archives: Counting Other Things
The Time Problem: Rigid Classifiers, Classifier Postmarks
Here is a thought experiment. Make the following assumptions about a historically diverse collection of texts: 1) I have classified them according to genre myself, and trust these classifications. 2) I have classified the items according to time of composition, and I trust these classifications. So, my items are both historically and generically diverse, […]
Google Books: Ratio of Inked Space to Blank Space
How could we create a proxy measure for the relative luxury of a book, and by extension the social prestige of its contents? One way of getting at this might be to measure the ratio of inked to non-inked space for a given work. While the measure is flawed — verse uses less page […]
Posted in Counting Other Things
Tagged Google Books, proxy measures, sociology of the book
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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 […]
Finding the Sherlock in Shakespeare: some ideas about prose genre and linguistic uniqueness
An unexpected point of linguistic similarity between plot-driven mystery fiction and Shakespeare plays lead to a consideration of textual similarities that remain invisible in the normal process of reading.
Also posted in Quant Theory, Shakespeare
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