Popularity of Shakespeare in Numbers (Infographic)

For one of my hacks for the EDINA ran Will’s World Hack day/week, I’ve decided to compile an infographic/visualisation using the search results from a number of search engines.

The data was compiled in a few ways:

• The demographic data came from Yahoo Clues using the search term ‘shakespeare’
• The film adaptations number came from Listal.com using the phrase ‘shakespeare adaptations’
• The popular plays data was acquired through a php script co-written by myself and a colleague (Chris Reilly). It cycled through all the play’s names and grabbed the number of overall results from Google
• The phrase completion data was a combination of playing with Google Autocomplete and Google search results

The hack itself took just under 5 hours. At least 1 of those hours was trying to work out what infographic package to use (I’ve never used any before) and understanding what makes an interesting infographic.