Wine Dark Sea is a blog started by Michael Witmore and is now maintained jointly by Witmore and Jonathan Hope. Together, they study the nature of linguistic variation on Shakespeare’s plays and in the corpus of early modern printed English texts.

If you are new to this site, you may want to navigate it by topic, which can be done using the “Category” tags on the right hand side of this page. Many of the posts on this blog deal with the statistical analysis of linguistic features in early modern literary texts, with an emphasis on Shakespeare. These techniques are explained in the sequence of posts listed under the Shakespeare tag, so if you are interested in this work, I recommend that you click on this tag and start with the oldest post first. These posts constitute a tutorial on the ongoing work I have been doing with Jonathan Hope (Strathclyde University) on the Shakespearean corpus, so those wishing to know more about this kind of work will find useful introductory material at the beginning of this thread.

The blog also deals with philosophical issues surrounding relationships among concrete and abstract objects (e.g., texts, mathematical models of texts, decisions of editors and critics). Posts dealing with philosophical matters can be found under the tag Quant Theory. Posts dealing with the value of counting things — in texts, on the net, in the natural or built environment — are filed under Counting Other Things.