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Tracking Social Networking In Shakespeare Plays
An anonymous reader writes "By feeding PieSpy (an IRC bot used to visualise social networks) with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays - it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works, and see Shakespeare in an entirely new light."
Not sure that's true. When I did English & English Lit. at school, I hated it. With a passion.
I read as little as possible, thought all the books must be rubbish.
Now I'm older, and I've reread some of the books we did (1984, Of Mice & Men, Royal Hunt of the Sun, various sharespeare, Chrysalids, Farenheit 451 etc).. and I'm finding that they're actually pretty good.
Perhaps you should try it? Get yourself a couple of Shakespeare DVDs (the Brannah ones are quite good), sit back, and enjoy. Then once you know the basis of the story you'll find that the text is rather less opaque.
Enjoy!
Or if you don't have the time to see the full set of DVDs you can try these guys. All 37 plays in 97 minutes and funny as hell.
Google cache
Program
http://www.jibble.org/files/PieSpy-0.2.2.zip
(Original link, only use if mine is down and YOU are going to mirror.)
Funny you fention the MPAA. Piracy was rife even in the day of Shakespeare. He was regularly ripped off when 'pirates' would discretely write down the words to the play whilst watching and then open the same play up else where. It is still unclear whether some of the plays are originals or infact copies (usually with errors or missing scenes).