In addition to Shakespeare, I love learning about educational technology, so I was very excited to learn about this resource from the website Plotting Plots. This is a free site that allows you to analyze the words in a text: how often they occur, and when.

This particular page is all about Julius Caesar and it allows you to plot how often a word is used. Julius Caesar is a play obsessed with ideas of government and what it means to be a citizen, a Roman, and what good government means. Therefore, the changing rhetoric of the play shows the journey of the characters- who stays true to his ideals and who doesn’t.

The website uses bar graphs and charts to show the appearance of words and concepts but once you have the data, you can translate it into other forms, such as Word clouds. When I made my class image for my Outschool class on Julius Caesar, I copied Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech, and made a word cloud of it. Notice that the biggest words are ‘Brutus,’ ‘Men,’ and ‘Cause,’