An Opinion piece in the Canberra Times on Professor Hugh Craig’s use of stylometrics in his workshop at DHA2012

John Keats once wrote to a friend that Shakespeare ”has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing”. There’s plenty still to say about Shakespeare himself, however, and at least one centuries-old truism about him was recently toppled – and by an Australian. Shakespeare had an extraordinarily large vocabulary, and this is a significant factor in his greatness as a playwright, correct? Maybe, maybe not. Computational stylistics – the use of statistical tools to analyse texts – was showcased in a workshop at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference at the Australian National University last week. Professor Hugh Craig, a Renaissance literature expert from the University of Newcastle, showed how to take a ”plausible, interesting, testable hypothesis” about a writer’s work and generate mappable conclusions about it. Sounds barren but the results can be counter-intuitive and fascinating.