Warpcore did you manually add all that up from chakoteya (which gives figures by episodes) or did you find a total somewhere?
And I don't get fully what the 'captain' part is. That is people saying captain to the captain? Are all the other lines spoken directly by the character or are they also lines about the character?
These are any lines spoken by that character, to that character, OR about that character by anyone else. Essentially any time a writer used that character in any line in any fashion. Manual wouldn't quite be the best way to put it, but I created the data myself from running searches on the chakoteya transcripts. She provides line counts for Voyager. This is a little different.
If you're familiar with *nix command line, best way to explain would be an example of exactly what I did. I've had the transcripts saved locally for years, so all this searching doesn't hit her server at all. It's all local.
Code:
~/NextGen $ for i in *.htm;do links2 -dump $i > $i.txt;done
~/NextGen $ grep \: *.txt|wc -l
63813
~/NextGen $ grep \: *.txt|grep -i "number one"|wc -l
390
First I started by stripping all the html markup with links2.
Then I got a rough count of all dialog for the entire season. In TNG's case 63813. The first search (grep) only matches lines that contain a colon, thus most non-dialog and whitespace/empty lines are removed.
The 3rd line shows an example of a search. The 2nd grep command reduces the output to only lines where anyone says the phrase "number one", typically referring to Riker of course. The "wc -l" counts the number of lines that were output by grep. In this search that was 390 times or lines of dialog. From there I put the outputs of searches into a spreadsheet.
I included "captain" because it was often used to refer to the main character regardless of series, but obviously it wasn't always so I didn't just sum the results together. This is nothing more than a word count of the chakoteya transcripts for the word "captain".
For example the line
RIKER: Captain Picard to the bridge.
The single line would add 1 to all 3 searches of Picard, captain, and Riker.
PICARD: Captain, welcome aboard.
That line would add to both Picard and captain. It's simply a total hit of a word, regardless of who is saying it.
My basic thought or question was how much the writers "used" any particular character in creating lines of dialog. That doesn't necessarily mean a certain actor is even involved in a scene. But I think it demonstrates how much all the characters' lives are being portrayed as existing around another individual. In TOS it's pretty extreme, since at least one out of every three lines (pronouns make the involvement go up even more but won't show in the searches) were based around Shatner's character from the perspective of inside the writers' minds. ENT is little better. IMO the series could have been called
The Adventures of Jonathon Archer and
Captain Kirk Gets Laid and wouldn't have seemed unusual.
Interesting exercise WarpCore. But... aside from the "captain" category being confusing, something seems wonky about some of the figures. Frex: Pulaski had more lines in TNG than LaForge did? That can't be right, she was only on the show for one season.
I hope I explained the "captain" search.
Just for further comparison. Few more searches from TNG:
admiral 216
captain 3280
commander 1520
lieutenant 665
ensign 395
As for LaForge vs Pulaski, you missed a line. LaForge and Geordi were independent searches. Pulaski is used more often for a line of dialog than Geordi, but LaForge occurred far more often than either in the transcripts. This is mostly because lines for Burton's character start with LAFORGE:. You could add the LaForge and Geordi counts together, but do know 7 lines using both would be double counted.
LaForge 4590 (7.19%)
Geordi 431 (0.68%)
Pulaski 569 (0.89%)
He's about the most casual captain of the Treks while still keeping his distance from the crew.
