Shakespeare and linguistic variation
Posts on genre, DocuScope, and the linguistic texture of Shakespeare’s plays, much of it written with Jonathan Hope over more than a decade of collaboration.
- A Genre Map of Shakespeare’s Plays from the First Folio (1623)
The following image, produced using the statistical package R, represents the position of the plays from Shakespeare’s First Folio according patterns discerned using inferential statistics. The plays themselves were…
- Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello? (Part I)
Twelfth Night is one of the classic Shakespearean comedies and so it is unsurprising that it appears in the Comedy quadrant that we obtained in our initial analysis. What is it about the language in this play that…
- Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello (Part 2)
Here is a second comic exchange from Twelfth Night . Maria’s plan has worked wonderfully. Malvolio has arrived cross-gartered and is quoting to Olivia little bits of the love letter he believes she has written to him.…
- Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello (Part III)
One of the aims of this kind of work is to find new things to think about or appreciate in texts that have been analyzed with traditional methods of literary criticism. But one does not always need an outside prompt…
- Love’s Labour’s Lost: The History
This passage from the Open Source Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost shows language patterns that push the play into the area where the Histories cluster, something visible in the scatterplot discussed below . Returning…
- More Shakespeare Outliers
I’ve expanded the labels here on our PCA scatterplot in order to see a few more items. Several things worth thinking about here: • Late Plays are clustering in neither the Comedy nor the History quadrants explored in…
- Docuscope Goes Live on Shakespeare Quarterly Open Peer Review
Jonathan Hope and I have written a new piece that we submitted to the special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on “Shakespeare and New Media.” The essay cleared the first stage of editorial review, and is now posted at…
- Shakespeare Quarterly Article Goes Live
I’ve just received word that our piece in Shakespeare Quarterly has gone online via JSTOR . The illustrations for the paper copy of the article are monochrome (with the exception of the cover), while there are color…
- Text: A Massively Addressable Object
Phone Book Dress by Jolis PaonsFirst At the Working Group for Digital Inquiry at Wisconsin, we’ve just begun our first experiment with a new order of magnitude of texts. Hope and I started working with 36 items about 6…
- Phylogenetic inference
Image by Greg McInerny and Stefanie Posavec – textual shifts between editions of Darwin’s Origin of Species (used by kind permission of the artist – see bottom of post for further details). In advance of starting up…
- 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…
- 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…
- What happens in Hamlet?
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…
- Hamlet in five words
Farah Karim-Cooper asked us to write something for the Globe to Globe Hamlet site. Here it is.
- Quantification and the language of later Shakespeare
The written version of a paper we gave in Paris last year (2013) has just been published by the Société française Shakespeare. Here is the paper (which is in English), and here are the citation details: Pour citer cet…
- Digital approaches to the language of Shakespearean Tragedy
This post supplies data and further diagrams for Digital approaches to Shakespearean tragedy to be published in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy , edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk. You…
- Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 1
In honor of the latest meeting of our NEH sponsored Folger workshop, Early Modern Digital Agendas, I wanted to start a series of posts about how we find “distances” between texts in quantitative terms, and about what…
- Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 2: Projecting Distances onto New Bases with PCA
It’s hard to conceive of distance measured in anything other than a straight line. The biplot below, for example, shows the scores of Shakespeare’s plays on the two Docuscope LATs discussed in the previous post ,…