I should have been glad to read: To Compute or Not to Compute—Wolfram|Alpha Analyzes Shakespeare’s Plays. Promoting Shakespeare has to be a first for Wolfram.
But the post reports word counts, unique words, and similar measures as master strokes of engineering, all things familiar since SNOBOL and before. And then makes this “bold” suggestion:
Asking Wolfram|Alpha for information about specific characters is where things really begin to get interesting. We took the dialog from each play and organized them into dialog timelines that show when each character talks within a specific play. For example, if you look at the dialog timeline of Julius Caesar, you’ll notice that Brutus and Cassius have steady dialog throughout the whole play, but Caesar’s dialog stops about halfway through. I wonder why that is?
That sort of analysis was old hat in the 1980’s.
Wolfram needs to catch up on the history of literary and linguistic computing rather than repeating it.
The back issues of Computational Linguistics or Literary and Linguistic Computing should help in that regard. To say nothing of Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship and similar works.
On digital humanities projects in general, see: Digital Humanities Spotlight: 7 Important Digitization Projects by Maria Popova, for a small sample.