Shakespeare's Slights

Overview

This project aims to analyze both the presence of insults, and the linguistic features present within 4 separate Shakespeare plays – Hamlet, Othello, The Comedy of Errors, and A Midsummer Nights Dream. With this project, we were looking to learn whether there was any correlation to play type to insult frequency, and if there are any insult types that appear more often than others.

Our main research questions:

• Is there any correlation between play genre and insult frequency?
• What pragmatic features are present within any given sentence to show explicitly that it is an insult?

If anything you’ve read seems interesting to you, or you even just want to see what kind of terrible insults Shakespeare came up with, feel free to browse our site!

About the Developers

This project was developed in the fall 2021 semester for Computational Methods in the Digital Humanities course at the University of Pittsburgh. The team consisted of four main members and a project mentor.

• Emily Martin is a senior Linguistics major German minor who loves all things linguistic and wanted to learn more about web technologies.
• Naiya Odhner is a junior majoring in Chinese and Linguistics. They took this class to satisfy the methods course requirement for the Linguistics major.
• Dillon Shuster is a senior English Literature and Public and Professional Writing major who enjoys anything computer based and hopes to continue learning about markup languages.
• Mason Gobat is a freshman planning to major in Computer Science. He took this class to learn more programming languages as well as more disciplines in which computer science is utilized.

A special thanks goes to our project mentor, Caroline Gish, and our professor, Dr. David Birnbaum. They have been essential to the completion of the project as sources from which we drew knowledge and strength.