James Fletcher
speaker
208 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2014
last heard Sep 2014
James Fletcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So how do you go about comparing the vocabulary of Shakespeare and a bunch of rappers?
Well, Matt used a method called token analysis.
That counts the number of unique words in any body of text that you feed into a computer program.
He analysed the first 35,000 words of lyrics recorded by around 100 hip-hop artists and for comparison, the first 5,000 words of seven Shakespeare plays.
So 35,000 words again.
Matt ran the numbers and found one name at the head of the pack.
I really hope he's talking about Shakespeare.
You just know that he isn't, Tim.
It's actually this guy.
Not too bad, Tim.
I'm impressed by the infinite variety of your knowledge.
Shakespeare doesn't do too badly.
He does come out ahead of most of the big mainstream stars like Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z or Kanye West.
They're all...
back in the pack behind Shakespeare.
The size of his vocabulary puts him in the top quarter, but barely.
Shakespeare had 22 rappers ahead of him, and they're mostly these more underground rappers.
Fair enough question.
I asked Matt if it's fair to compare Shakespeare to the rappers this way.
Well, in that case, I think it's time to talk about stylometrics.
Showing 21–40 of 208 · page 2 of 11
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