Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 14, 2014

Classifying Shakespearean Drama with Sparse Feature Sets

Filed under: Feature Spaces,Sparse Data,Text Analytics — Patrick Durusau @ 4:06 pm

Classifying Shakespearean Drama with Sparse Feature Sets by Douglas Duhaime.

From the post:

In her fantastic series of lectures on early modern England, Emma Smith identifies an interesting feature that differentiates the tragedies and comedies of Elizabethan drama: “Tragedies tend to have more streamlined plots, or less plot—you know, fewer things happening. Comedies tend to enjoy a multiplication of characters, disguises, and trickeries. I mean, you could partly think about the way [tragedies tend to move] towards the isolation of a single figure on the stage, getting rid of other people, moving towards a kind of solitude, whereas comedies tend to end with a big scene at the end where everybody’s on stage” (6:02-6:37). 

The distinction Smith draws between tragedies and comedies is fairly intuitive: tragedies isolate the poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. Comedies, on the other hand, aggregate characters in order to facilitate comedic trickery and tidy marriage plots. While this discrepancy seemed promising, I couldn’t help but wonder whether computational analysis would bear out the hypothesis. Inspired by the recent proliferation of computer-assisted genre classifications of Shakespeare’s plays—many of which are founded upon high dimensional data sets like those generated by DocuScope—I was curious to know if paying attention to the number of characters on stage in Shakespearean drama could help provide additional feature sets with which to carry out this task.

A quick reminder that not all text analysis is concerned with 140 character strings. 😉

Do you prefer:

high dimensional

where every letter in “high dimensional” is a hyperlink with an unknown target or a fuller listing:

Allison, Sarah, and Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Franco Moretti, Michael Witmore. Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment

Jockers, Matthew. Machine-Classifying Novels and Plays by Genre

Hope, Jonathan and Michael Witmore. “The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’”: Digital Approaches Shakespeare’s Language of Genre

Hope, Jonathan. Shakespeare by the numbers: on the linguistic texture of the Late Plays

Hope, Jonathan and Michael Witmore. The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare

Lenthe, Victor. Finding the Sherlock in Shakespeare: some ideas about prose genre and linguistic uniqueness

Stumpf, Mike. How Quickly Nature Falls Into Revolt: On Revisiting Shakespeare’s Genres

Stumpf, Mike. This Thing of Darkness (Part III)

Tootalian, Jacob A. Shakespeare, Without Measure: The Rhetorical Tendencies of Renaissance Dramatic Prose

Ullyot, Michael. Encoding Shakespeare

Witmore, Michael. A Genre Map of Shakespeare’s Plays from the First Folio (1623)

Witmore, Michael. Shakespeare Out of Place?

Witmore, Michael. Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 Figures

Witmore, Michael. Visualizing English Print, 1530-1800, Genre Contents of the Corpus

Decompiling Shakespeare (Site is down. Was also down when the WayBack machine tried to archive the site in July of 2014)

I prefer the longer listing.

If you are interested in Shakespeare, Folger Digital Texts has free XML and PDF versions of his work.

I first saw this in a tweet by Gregory Piatetsky

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