Apparently, I was not the only geek who decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter saga with statistical analysis. Students Moritz Haine and Markus Dienstknecht of the Data Science for Decision Making Master at Maastricht University started their own celebratory project as part of a course Information Retrieval and Text Mining.
Students in previous years looked at for example Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Game of Thrones. However, to our surprise, Harry Potter was missing. Since the books are about magic, we decided it would be interesting to identify all of the spells and the wizards that cast the most spells
Moritz Haine
From the books, the students extracted 41 different wizards, 64 different spells and 253 spells. Moritz points out that they could only include spoken spells, even though the most powerful wizards can also cast spells without naming them. They expect this might be the reason why Dumbledore and Voldemort are not ranked as high. At the end of their project, Moritz and Markus visualized their results in a spell-character mapping.
paulvanderlaken.com 