NELL is the Never Ending Language Learner, a project out of Carnegie Mellon that is reading the web and teaching itself about … everything.
I first spotted the reference here on IO9, but knew I had to post about it when the question got to “What happens when NELL learns English enough to become a Shakespearean scholar?”

Turns out that you can browse and download what NELL’s learned so far. So you know what I did next, of course. Here’s a link to what she knows about Shakespeare.
The data’s obviously still in a very noisy form, with lots of redundancy. But still, you can see patterns emerging. She’s 100% confident that he’s a writer, and 99.8% confident that he wrote Othello. Notice down below in the “bookwriter” category you can spot names like Jonson, Marlowe and even Bloom.
It’s not always perfect, of course – clicking around tells me that it thinks Romeo and Juliet is a location, because there’s a “Romeo and Juliet School”. I’d be willing to bet that it’s not been told about the concept of “play” or “character”. Search “Hamlet” and the best match it can come up with is “moviestar actor” for Kenneth Brannagh.
GIve it time …

Maybe it’s because of the special attachment I have to The Tempest, but … *damn*. This sort of thing is like my Star Wars. Shakespeare with magic and special effects? I can’t wait!

http://io9.com/5656797/the-gender+swapping-hyper+stylized-trailer-for-shakespeares-the-tempest

The only question in my mind is whether I’ll take the kids to see it. And, honestly, if nobody dies a particularly gory death and nobody gets naked, I think I just might!

Re: the trailer itself, I quite like it, except for the “STUPIDITY” tag they stick n there it’s really out of place. Fine, you want to say “It’s got funny bits”, but sticking STUPIDITY among more epic words like TREACHERY and REVENGE just doesn’t work.

I don’t know what to do with SHAKESPEARE’S FINAL MASTERPIECE. That’s maybe kinda sorta not so accurate? But if it helps to put the butts in the seats, let ’em go with it.

I wish they’d made Caliban a bit more monstrous. Ariel appears to get the lion’s share of the special effects attention, all Djimon Honsou (sp?) has to work with is a loincloth and some eye makeup.
Update: It’s rated PG-13 for “some nudity and suggestive content”. Not exactly sure what that means, and will likely have to screen before letting my kids (who, you remember, are as young as 4) see this one.

Hi Everybody!
I’m back from my cruise! Miss me? Anything good happen while I was gone?
No exciting Shakespeare news down in the Caribbean, though I did finish reading a hard sci fi novel “Ilium” that I’ll be reviewing shortly, which contains much Shakespeare and has a plot straight out of The Tempest.
I did also give out a bunch of business cards and bore the heck out of my dinner mates by talking at length about Mr. Shakespeare, as I tend to do. I like to warn people to just go ahead and walk away from me or otherwise change the subject, because I won’t stop unless you do. They tend to take me up on that. 🙂
-Duane

Hi Everybody,

Just a quick administrative note that I’m going to be on a cruise ship for the next week with no laptop.  What tends to happen in these situations is that posts tip over to less than a couple days, and then when people want to have a discussion they can’t because spam moderation kicks in.

In anticipation of this I’ll be turning off the “moderation on old posts” switch for the week.  This means that all your posts should show up without my intervention. It also means that a couple of spam posts will probably slip through, so please ignore them. It seemed like a fair trade off.

Ok, that’s it for me. I’m not leaving until Sunday morning so you may spot me on the Twitter between now and then, but I wanted to get this note out while I still had access to something that could post.  While I’m gone feel free to browse the merchandise, maybe check out the book.  You know the deal. 🙂

See ya when I don’t get back, assuming I don’t get shipwrecked!

Mensa candidate Andrew Garfield had this to say upon being cast as Spiderman in the latest example of how Hollywood can’t seem to get a movie right:

“I think the material is elevated, and it’s just as meaningful and just as important as Shakespeare.”

I appreciate the desire to give comics some credibility, and arguably they are a part of modern culture (though if we’re going to talk about cultural archetypes I’d lean more towards Superman than Spiderman). But Shakespeare? Really? When you’re doing little more than starring in a movie about Facebook, and now moving on to a reboot of a movie that’s only, what, less than 10 years old?