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
Oh, yeah, yeah, I know, another hip-hop group, yeah.
I think I just flushed you out there, Tim.
Not quite the hip-hop fan you claim to be.
Stylometrics is a field of literature studies, and it uses computers and data analysis to tell us things about literary styles.
So for your second opinion, I went to Professor Hugh Craig.
He's director of the Centre for Linguistic and Literary Computing at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
Now, it turns out that this technique has had an impact in Shakespeare studies as well.
The reason people thought Shakespeare used so many more unique words than anyone else is that a relatively large amount of his work survives and people were simply counting all the words in his entire output.
But a couple of years ago, Hugh Craig used a broadly similar technique to Matt Daniels to analyse Shakespeare's vocabulary and he came up with a surprising result.
Yeah, exactly.
That's it.
It's strange that people are so keen to find some objective proof of Shakespeare's greatness.
And you can see the same urge in the responses to Matt Daniel's hip hop chart, too.
People are desperate for evidence that this rapper is better than that rapper.
These new sophisticated analytical tools really tempt us to believe that there must be a number out there that proves the greatness of someone like Shakespeare.
But Hugh Craig says he hasn't found such a number yet.
And for rappers as much as for Shakespeare, vocabulary is of limited use.
It makes sense when you think about it.
Tim, can you name a book which might have the highest number of unique words?
That's a low blow, Tim.
Showing 41–60 of 208 · page 3 of 11
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