The Simpsons by the Data by Todd Schneider.
From the post:
The Simpsons needs no introduction. At 27 seasons and counting, it’s the longest-running scripted series in the history of American primetime television.
The show’s longevity, and the fact that it’s animated, provides a vast and relatively unchanging universe of characters to study. It’s easier for an animated show to scale to hundreds of recurring characters; without live-action actors to grow old or move on to other projects, the denizens of Springfield remain mostly unchanged from year to year.
As a fan of the show, I present a few short analyses about Springfield, from the show’s dialogue to its TV ratings. All code used for this post is available on GitHub.
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Alert! You must run Flash in order to access Simpsons World, the source of Todd’s data.
Advice: Treat Flash as malware and run in a VM.
Todd covers the number of words spoken per character, gender imbalance, focus on characters, viewership, and episode summaries (tf-idf).
Other analysis awaits your imagination and interest.
BTW, if you want comedy data a bit closer to the edge, try Text Mining South Park by Kaylin Walker. Kaylin uses R for her analysis as well.
Other TV programs with R-powered analysis?