I love finding stuff like this, it really bring out my inner geek.
The people over at Wolfram, who are perhaps best known these days as the acolytes in charge of the Wolfram Alpha search and research engine, have unleashed a tool to do word analysis on Shakespeare’s plays. The sample make it pretty plain – they point to the MIT version of the text, then count words, then graph words. You’ve seen graphs like this often, I’m sure — how often are the words “love and death” used in Romeo and Juliet? What about darkness in Macbeth? Or blood?
The best part is that they didn’t just unleash a raw textual analyzer and say have at it like we’re all still college students looking for a thesis topic. They’re crowd sourcing it. They ask, “Could you think of data mining analysis or visualizations to apply to Shakespeare’s works?”
I bet we could! Who’s got ideas?