Determining characteristics of a formation. At least some of the illustrative embodiments are methods including determining at least one characteristics of a shale formation. The determining may include: collecting optically interacted electromagnetic radiation from a portion of the shale formation; directing a first portion of the optically interacted electromagnetic radiation from the formation to a first multivariate optical element (MOE), the first MOE creates first modified electromagnetic radiation; applying the first modified electromagnetic radiation to a first detector, the first detector creates a first signal; and determining a first characteristic of the shale formation from the first signal.