This morning a reader sent me this link about what happens when you tell search engine Wolfram Alpha about Shakespeare’s plays:

Entering a play into Wolfram|Alpha, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, brings up basic information, such as number of acts, scenes, and characters. It also provides more in-depth info like longest word, most frequent words, number of words and sentences, and more. It’s also easy to find more specific information about a particular act or scene with queries like “What is the longest word in King Lear?”, “What is the average sentence length of Macbeth?”, and “How many unique words are there in Twelfth Night?”.

I suppose this has value at some level.  But if anything it goes to show how limited a pure textual analysis is, don’t you think?  Great, it can determine the longest word in a play.  But who gets to decide what that means, and why it is (or is not) important?

Reminds me of an age-old quote, attributed to Picasso:  “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

I’ve always been far more intrigued with stories of AI in computer science where they attempt to make sure leaps about things that are important, and why they are important.  Pioneers Doug Lenat and Roger Schank did a great deal of work in this area — Lenat’s “Cyc” project can easily be seen as a precursor to what Wolfram Alpha has become.

Something that I’ve always dreamed about, and who knows maybe one day I’ll build it, is a sort of search engine where you ask questions of the characters from within the context of the play, like one of those murder mystery tv shows where you’re the detective coming in to question the suspects.  “Hamlet, why did you kill Polonius?”  “I thought he was my uncle.”  “When did you do it?”  “When I went to see my mother in her bedchamber, after we saw the play.”  That sort of thing.  And you could switch around your context to ask different characters their take on the same situation.

That wouldn’t have any academic value per se, as the programmer would have to pick a specific interpretation of events and then state it as if it were fact.  But as far as entertaining the user while also teaching her something?  I think it could be a big hit.  “Chat bots” have always been amusing, to a degree.  This would just take it to the next level.

Here’s a conversation I’ve always wanted to start.  When it comes to a great unknown, be it religion or the the lottery or Mr. Shakespeare, I’ve found that I can never truly straddle that line between what I *wish* to be true, and what my logical brain causes me to *believe* is true.  I may wish to hit the lottery when I buy a ticket, but I believe that I almost certainly will not.

I’ve always wanted to do that with Shakespeare.  We don’t know a lot about the man, and pretty safely never will.  So I open it up — what do you *believe* is true about Shakespeare?  And what do you *wish* was true?  This conversation may drive the historians (who presumably would like to know what *is* true) nuts, but the romantics can have a field day. 🙂

I wish that Shakespeare was indeed attempting to write this cookbook for what it means to be a human that he managed to create for us.  I wish that everything we choose to read into his works is in fact really there because he deliberately put it there.  A message for all time, from the master.

I wish that he had a happy home life, and that his writings on romance stemmed directly back from his own feelings for his wife.

I wish that someday we’d know the answer, definitively, to all the great questions we have.  What’s the deal with his education and life experience? How’d he learn so much about so many topics? What was he doing for his lost years?

I believe that we’ll never know those things for sure.  I believe that in another century we may pick up a few clues along the way but it will all still just be peace-meal guesses at what the clues mean.

I believe that his home life was about as difficult as any man’s during his day.  I don’t believe there was anything magical about it.

I believe that while William Shakespeare was *better* at his craft than the next guy, that this is most likely all he ever strived to be.  He was a shrewd businessman and a bit of a penny-pincher from all we can tell, so I don’t have any difficulty believing that he saw his plays as a way to make a lot of money.  His craft (his gift?) came from putting something different on the stage, from changing the audience’s expectations about what they were about to see.

Know what the major difference is between what you believe and what you wish?  What you believe should constantly be subject to scrutiny.  New information should make you welcome a change in what you believe.  Bring me new evidence to clearly dispute any of the beliefs that I listed, and assuming that I believe your evidence :), I’ll change my beliefs.  But what we wish?  We can cling to that as long as we like.  That’s ours.

So, news of the week is this superdy-dooper high-resolution scan of what might be a newly discovered Shakespeare signature:

A professor and his students have identified a probable new Shakespeare signature in a 16th century legal text. Using a 50-megapixel multispectral digital imaging system, members of The Lazarus Project have tweaked the status of the autograph from “who knows” to “possible.”

Highlights — the signature’s been known about (1942), it’s not like they just *saw* it.  What we’re talking about is confidence levels over whether in fact it is Shakespeare’s autograph and not a forgery.  In particular the use of super cool new technology to do it.  They call it a “multi-spectral fingerprint,” and are working to compare this multi-spectral fingerprint of the signature against the same fingerprint for the Ireland forgeries.  That’s an interesting idea — if it’s a near-perfect match to known signatures that would be good evidence, but if it turns out to be a near-perfect match to a known forgery that would be evidence as well.

The bigger question would be what it means if this is a real signature.  It appears in a legal text.  How would it have gotten there? What would that say about Shakespeare’s access to such books, and knowledge of the law?

…you know, just writing that paragraph makes me think that we’re going to decide it’s not his signature.  I don’t know why.  Just a feeling.

UPDATE – Lifted from the comments, here’s a link to Folger’s article on the topic with lots of pictures.

So the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) is having its annual conference here in Boston this weekend!  If anybody’s at that show and actually reading this, Hello!  Enjoy my town.

I am not a member, but I did head into town to at long last meet my partner in crime KJ – owner, operator and chief rabble-rouser of the world-renown Bardfilm blog. If you’re not subscribed over there (not to mention following him on Twitter), what are you waiting for?  Where precisely do you think I get all my best ideas?  He’s like my own Holinshed’s Chronicles.

Anyway, three funny stories come out of the night.  First, we’re trying to decide where to go grab a drink.  I point out that despite being born and raised here in Massachusetts I did not attend college in the heart of Boston so I’m about as lost as the next guy.  We end up at a place called, are you ready for this?  The Globe.  I mean, come on! How could we *not* go there?  I joke about showing up and having 500 Shakespeare conference attendees all thinking the same thing, but when KJ asked the concierge for directions she said, “Surprisingly, you’re the first person that’s asked.”

So we’re hanging out at the bar, having a few pints of Guinness. (I tell KJ that had I known he had a preference for Guinness we could have gone to a more traditional Irish spot just so I could hear him ask, “Do you have Guinness?” and see what kind of reaction it got :). )  He shows me the program for the conference and we’re discussing the “Shakespeare in New Media” presentation which is likely to be the one nearest and dearest to my heart.  There are no abstracts for each presentation but they do each come with a laundry list of authors/presenters. 

Son of a gun, I see the name Erin Presley from Eastern Kentucky University. I know her!  In fact, once I got back to my computer to dig it up, here’s the February 2006 comment she posted, asking for permission to cite me in a paper she was working on.  While sitting at the bar I fire up Facebook (where I have her linked) and post a comment on her wall.  Wondering whether she’ll see that, or this post.  Small world!  Hi, Erin!

Lastly, I wasn’t going to add this one but it just came up this morning and I found it hysterical.  When I got home and filled my wife in on our summit meeting, she’s the sort who wanted to hear less about the Shakespeare and more about Mr. J – how old are his kids, will he be home for Easter, all that good stuff.  So this morning over IM we’re talking and I fill him in on that story.  He agrees that our wives would probably get along as well as we do.

“Question,” he asks, “Did your wife make you promise not to meet me in any dark back alleys behind the hotel?”

“Yes!” I write back, and then I wonder whether I tweeted something about that.  “What made you ask that?”

“Oh, my wife told me the same thing,” he replies.

Wives.  What’re ya gonna do. 🙂

I am happy to report that my experiment in creating Android apps is complete!  I pushed the Publish button today on my very first app for the marketplace.

Insults for Shakespeare Geeks is exactly what you think it is, a spin on the old “pick 1 each from column A/B/C” Shakespeare Insult Kit.  My particular twist on it is that mine also offers an “Insult my friend” option where you can text (or tweet or Facebook) your favorite insults to someone you love.

You folks know me and you know my commitment to the quality of
Shakespeare stuff. There’s already a handful of insult generators in the
market, but from what I can tell they are all the exact same thing – just insult after insult after insult.  I try to go a step beyond that.  Besides, one of the great things about the world of apps is that updates are automatic, so if people like and download this first version I plan to keep cranking out new and exciting enhancements to it. 

I’d love it if folks could take it for a spin, and possibly do me the favor of leaving a positive review. The hardest part about making a dent in the marketplace is getting your app noticed.  There’s already over 800 hits for the word “Shakespeare”, so that alone isn’t going to get me noticed.  I need my Shakespeare-loving fans, followers and friends to help a fellow geek out by spreading the word. 

If you don’t have an Android device, please at least consider forwarding/tweeting/sharing this message around so that your friends who do have Android devices get a chance to see it.

The entire purpose of this experiment was to learn the type of effort it takes to get an app created and published into the market. Now I know.  Based on the reaction to this app I can start planning my next great idea!

Thanks everyone for all your help!  Ya bunch of venomed, boil-brained puttocks!