Fiddling about with words

Over the last two years, I wrote an awful lot of words about the 23 Bond films that had been made up until the end of 2012. (We don't count the David Niven Casino Royale, or Never Say Never Again, because they were, well, shit.) Inspired by Jon Millward's Deep Inside, a statistical analysis of porn stars, I thought I'd do some data mining of my own. Unfortunately, I'm still not very familiar with R, that programmatic workbench beloved of statisticians, so to get my feet wet I thought I'd start by analysing and displaying the frequency of different words in what I wrote. And here's what you get:

Working on a phrase gang

After work today I came home and carried on slogging through my auto-gibberish generator.  It's been ages (well, 2 months since I started working on this) - partly because I've been rather lacksidaisical at working on it, what with everything else going on, and partly because it's harder than it looked initially.

Playing with language

Today I was looking at Get TEDPad, where a chap has run some statistical analysis against transcripts of the first five hundred or so TED lectures, and figured out how to generate snippets of new, non-existent TED speeches that sound either convincing and good quality English, or (when he switches it to the dark side) good quality English spoken by an idiot obsessed by whatever the New York Times tells him is important at this particular moment in time.