WolframAlpha Analyzes Shakespeare

[tubemonkey]

For those interested in the technical details of Shakespeare's plays, WolframAlpha offers some interesting insight. In addition to Shakespeare, they've also added some other classic works such as Moby Dick, Great Expectations, and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

For hundreds of years, scholars have carefully studied the plays of Shakespeare, breaking down the language and carefully dissecting every act and scene. We thought it would be interesting to see what sorts of computational insights Wolfram|Alpha could provide, so we uploaded the complete catalog of Shakespeare’s plays into our database. This allows our users to examine Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, and the rest of the Bard’s plays in an entirely new way.

Entering a play into Wolfram|Alpha, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, brings up basic information, such as number of acts, scenes, and characters. It also provides more in-depth info like longest word, most frequent words, number of words and sentences, and more. It’s also easy to find more specific information about a particular act or scene with queries like “What is the longest word in King Lear?”, “What is the average sentence length of Macbeth?”, and “How many unique words are there in Twelfth Night?”.
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In addition to Shakespeare’s plays, Wolfram|Alpha can also analyze other famous works of literature, including Moby Dick, Great Expectations, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We hope you enjoy being able to perform computational analysis on these texts and would love your suggestions on new features and texts to add.

[bgalbrecht]

It makes me wonder if their technical analysis will report probabilities that an given Elizabethan work was written by the same author as another Elizabethan work. How knows, maybe they'll answer that age old question, who really wrote all those Shakespeare works?

[plib]

Hmmm. I wonder if these guys have read "The Immortal Bard"?