Last Saturday, I had a ball chatting with The Tolkien Professor and Dave Kale about digital humanities, scholarly collaboration, and words analysis of The Hobbit. During our broadcast, we raised about $3K for Signum University, and I’m tickled pick that the folks in the audience enjoyed our word-geekery as much as Dave and I did.
Thank you for attending, sending in your questions, and best of all, participating in the little graph-guessing game that I created. My next task is to put up those words we graphed and add them to the concordance.
words that you were saying 
Hello Sparrow,
Thank you for the very nice talk on Saturday in the Mythgard Webathon about your work with Lexos. I’m the mathematics assistant professor (lecturer as we call it here) from the UK who reached out via the question box at some point. Someone on the other side of the interface (I’m guessing it was you) replied by saying to contact them via their blog. So here’s hoping this message lands with the right person. Feel free to drop me an email, if you are happy continuing (or starting, really) our conversation.
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Holy tomatoes, I would love to still be in touch! I have only ust learned how to find old comments which languished!
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A question came up while I was listening to the rebroadcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mki9I57O5Bk (I like Christmas on Friday; lots of free time!) I decided to take Prof. Olsen’s smackdown as a challenge.
Have you done any really-basic statistics on the text? I’d like to see the pattern of how many words are in each sentence as the story goes on. I know JRRT played games with sentence-length for emphasis in LotR — does he do it in The Hobbit as well?
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He sure does!
I’ll put this on my “after the holidays” list 🙂
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If you can use perl, I have a script that does that to plain-text. So far, my conclusion is that Lord Dunsany wrote long tails, but perhaps some day I’ll think of something better. 😦
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