spells – paulvanderlaken.com

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.

This is the latest addition to my collection of Harry Potter analyses, to which a similar, interactive web application of spell usage was added only last week.

In my second Harry Plotter blog (22-Aug-2017), I wrote:

I would like to demonstrate how regular expressions can be used to retrieve (sub)strings that follow a specific format. We could use regex to examine, for instance, when, and by whom, which magical spells are cast.

Well, Prusinowskik (real name unknown) beat me to it, and how! S/He formed a comprehensive list of all spells found in the Harry Potter saga (see below), and categorized these into “spells“, “charms“, and “curses“, and into “popular“, “dueling” and “unforgivable” purposes. Next, Prusinowskik built an interactive Shiny application with lovely JavaScript graphs (package: rCharts) for us to discover precisely when during the saga which spells are cast (see also below). Moreover, the analysis was repeated for both the books and the movies.

Truly excellent work Prusinowskik! The Shiny app can be found here.