It’s been a while since I’ve posted links, and they’re starting to pile up! I have interesting friends. Some of these links came to me through them.
WriteWords Phrase Frequency Counter. Enter a number of words in the phrase (2 – 10) and then enter text, the more the better. I pasted in an entire novel. Hit submit, and the software will give you a list, from most frequent to least frequent, of all the phrases you repeated in your document. If you use only two-word phrases, note you’ll probably get a high frequency of “he said” and “she said.”
First Sounds is “is an informal collaborative of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists, other individuals, and organizations who aim to make mankind’s earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time…The most newsworthy feat accomplished under the First Sounds banner was when collaborators succeeded in playing a sound recording made in 1860 – 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing the French folksong “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit.” It was made on April 9, 1860 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on his “phonautograph” – a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp. Scott made the recording to analyze sounds visually, not to play them back. (Edison retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound in 1877.)”
An Electronic Cabaret: Paris Street Songs, 1748–50, Sung by Hélène Delavault, a supplement to Robert Darnton’s Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
My escape from Donington Hall: preceded by an account of the siege of Kiao-Chow in 1915 by Gunther Plüschow, in translation. This is another example of the absolutely amazing research material one can turn up online. I haven’t read it yet, but oh what an amazing resource for fiction!
And just for fun, the Shakespeare Insult Kit. Thou pribbling unchin-snouted joithead!
