How many Rons per Hermione - numerical analysis of Ron's alleged decline

[Tim Regan]

No: HPFGUIDX 81919

Hi All,

--- In HPforGrownups  "Amy Z" wrote:
> The real purpose of my post is to induct Dumbledad into the 
> League of  Obsessed Nitpickers.  

Oh how fantastic, I'm so proud, thank you Amy. Kate (my wife) felt 
that my numerical analysis of the text proved what a loony I was – 
now it is official :-)

> Ben Jones burst on the scene with the legendary "incidences 
> of green and red" analysis of Ought One (messages #23407 
> and #23435).

Those posts are amazing; I'll embark on an update right away. I did 
the same for "wrapper" but I should have listed them in post 69520. 
I get the impression that Ben did his without any electronic aid. 
Very impressive.

> Er, now I have to justify posting this to the list, so let's see 
what 
> I can come up with.  Only that, as valuable as name-counting is, a 
> character's importance does not necessarily correlate neatly with 
the 
> frequency of his/her appearance.  At times it can be pointed up by 
> his/her conspicuous *absence*: viz. Hermione during her petrified 
> period in CoS, and Ron during his falling-out with Harry in GoF. 

Yes that's a very good point, though as far as I remember Ron is 
talked about a lot during his `absence' in GoF.

> I also wonder if the Ron/Hermione ratio is actually a bit weaker 
than 
> it appears because it is necessary for JKR to mention his name a 
bit 
> more often, due to male pronouns being ambiguous when Harry is 
around 

That's interesting, and probably true. It would imply that the word 
Hermione should get used more as Ginny and Luna appear in the story 
more. I'll test that with Book 6: Harry Potter and the Department of 
Statistics. Your comment also lead me to check the occurrence of the 
pronouns "he" and "she". Here are the results:

1) 6.98 He/Her in PS/SS
2) 5.69 He/Her in CoS
3) 5.80 He/Her in PoA
4) 4.30 He/Her in GoF
5) 3.20 He/Her in OotP

And here are the occurrences per page of the words "he" and "she"

1) 5.69 he/page, 0.82 she/page in SS
2) 4.49 he/page, 0.79 she/page in CoS
3) 4.75 he/page, 0.82 she/page in PoA
4) 5.43 he/page, 1.26 she/page in GoF
5) 5.81 he/page, 1.81 she/page in OotP

If you plot these, both show a similar absolute rate of increase 
over the last two books (i.e. he/page and she/page each grew by 0.5 
+/- 0.18 from Book 3 to Book 4 and from Book 4 to Book 5) but the 
percentage growth of she/page is amazing. The measure she/page grew 
by 54% from Book 3 to Book 4 and then by a further 44% from Book 4 
to Book 5! Perhaps JKR has been consciously responding to criticisms 
of the lack of female involvement in the books.

Cheers

Dumbledad