Shakespeare & network analysis, cool.
https://cameronraymond.me/blog/shakespeare-netlsd/

But if the author had partnered with a Shakespearean, we might have learned

1. Which 2 plays were unexpectedly classified?
2. What info did the system get about genre? (Was Merchant a comedy? What about Troilus?) +

2. What about the other genres? History plays? Romances?

I, for one, want to hear if Richard III is more like to a tragedy than it is to 1 Henry IV. Do the Roman histories differ markedly from the English?

Romances/tragicomedies: more tragic or comic in this model?

4. Can this analysis be used within a play to determine an abrupt "change in genre" between acts? (say, act 5 in Henry V)
Between scenes? (Induction to Shrew, anyone?)
Or in how individual characters behave/interact? (Hi, Falstaff!) +

A Shakespearean would have cited existing research on genre and form, including those that take digital/quantitative approaches, such as work by @MichaelWitmore & @wellsheisnt, @abasu_ , @ullyot, and @Mattie_Burkert (importantly, moving beyond just Shakespeare) +

Aside: here's a cool example of an undergrad, Darby Foster, doing some of this work, guest posted on @heatherfro 's blog https://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/WP/vep/author/hfroehlich/ +

And even the distantest of distant readings would, at some point, bring it back to the texts, especially when the corpus is so admittedly tiny. +

I like to collaborate with people from other disciplines. I've published with computer scientists and economists. Other disciplines can tell us a lot about Shakespeare. +

But if we stop using Shakespeare as the litmus test (and we'll need more and better digitized texts to do so), maybe these computer-assisted analyses could point us to new voices. +

Likewise, if we're so focused on Shakespeare, we're going to miss out on some really cool genres altogether. I love Shakespeare (more than the next person!), but we don't have to start and end everything with Shakespeare. /FIN

(yes, I purposefully started and ended this thread w Shakespeare)