Slashdot linked to a neat story. What happens when you feed Shakespeare's plays into a program designed to map relationships in IRC chats? You get a visual map of the relationships in the play.
PieSpy is a tool designed to infer and visualize social networks on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It works by applying simple heuristics to work out who is talking to whom. This information can be used to produce a visualization of the social network, essentially showing which users are connected and how strong those connections are.
As PieSpy matured, it became obvious that IRC was not the only suitable testing ground. By feeding PieSpy with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays - it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works.
I never thought that IRC ("a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards") could relate to the works of Shakespeare :). But there you go. A new way to analyze random chattering + a great work of literature = an new way to understand a great work of literature. That's a pretty cool hack!
Posted by sarah at March 11, 2004 08:19 AM in Ideas