Stephan Thiel made Understanding Shakespeare as his B.A. thesis project to provide a new analysis of Shakespeare’s works and invite his audience to re-examine their understanding of them. The visualizations were created using Processing and toxiclibs. They present the most frequently used words for each character broken down by scene. Characters are ordered by appearance in the scene from left to right. Presenting the characters of each scene in order of appearance preserves some of the natural flow of the story. The overall advantage to this format of presentation for text analysis of a narrative is clear, as it uses a reasonable chunk size (scenes) to preserve the distinct moments throughout the story. e.g.: With Romeo and Juliet, the balcony scene in act 2 scene 2 is full of love and warm-fuzzies, with vocabulary to match, but that is quite different from act 5 scene 3 where our two leads kill themselves.

[ Understanding Shakespeare ]