Existing work

Firstly, after doing this much work, I have discovered someone already has done a similar investigation: How long is a Star Trek title? by Bruce Bennett, so check that out. One thing it does have that I don’t, is charts.

Improving workflow

The analysis so far has been done using a Google Docs spreadsheet. I then manually wrote the Markdown for the blog posts, which involved some tedious and error prone tables.

I was originally not going to include the giant list of every single-word episode title, since creating that table did not look like fun.

But… I also started working a little program to do more sophisticated processing, and realised I could also make the program generate the Markdown for me.

The program is a .NET 7 console application writen in C#, and writing it was probably quicker than the manipulation I had to do with the spreadsheet in the first place. It was definitely quicker than producing the Markdown tables in the first post manually.

The end result is I can generate tables of all sorts of random episode lists with different properties of varying levels of interest with very little effort.