Announcing Shaxpir 4.4
Benji Smith
Mar 27, 2018
NOTE: This article discusses Prosecraft.io, a linguistic analysis website we discontinued in August 2023. To learn more how things work today, check out our follow up article: How Shaxpir Does Linguistics
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Hi everybody! I hope springtime finds you all well, and that you’ve had a productive writing season. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the release of Shaxpir 4.4, which is available for immediate download.
For the first time, this release gives every author the ability to see the Emotional Story Arc of their entire novel, based on a sophisticated sentiment analysis of the positive and negative words in their text.
By analyzing the balance between positive words (like “home” and “trust”) and negative words (like “disaster” and “fighting”), we can actually show an author the changing emotional intensity of their story arc.
With tools like this, an author can more mindfully craft the language of their prose to match the intended arc of the characters’ journey.
We first introduced this chart our on our companion website, Prosecraft.io, where authors can perform linguistic analysis on an enormous library of popular novels, written by thousands of different authors, and compare their writing style with the authors they most admire.
With the release of Shaxpir 4.4, we’ve incorporated this analysis method into an actual word-processor for professional authors… the first writing platform ever to offer this kind of sophisticated linguistic analysis of fiction. It’s all based on cutting edge linguistics research, by the University of Vermont: Computational Story Lab, into the aggregate lexicographic and linguistic structure of stories, and now it’s available to any author in the world.
We hope you love it!
In addition to the new Sentiment Analysis features, we’ve also fixed a bunch of bugs and annoyances:
Adding margin comments caused the editor to scroll back to the top.
The Add Avatar button sometimes had no effect.
It was impossible to Delete an Avatar, once created!
Sometimes, when resizing an image thumbnail, the cropping handles failed to appear.
Automatic insertion of section breaks (after typing “***”) sometimes had unpredictable effects after UNDO.
The SpellCheck dictionary was missing some very basic words (such as: and, the, of, etc.)
Other minor layout glitches and bugs.