stéfan sinclair :: scribblings & musings

A neighour and friend said he thought of me when he read an article about researchers doing text analysis to study the possible effects of Alzheimer’s on the vocabulary richness of authors. I asked to see the article and was very pleasantly surprised to see our TAPoR colleague Ian Lancashire prominently featured in a recent Maclean’s article (Ian has been a wonderful pioneer and leader for the text analysis community in Canada and beyond, earning him an Outstanding Achievement Award for Computing in the Arts and Humanities). The study was looking at longitudinal trends in the writings of Agatha Christie. Among other notable findings, the study identified a 30 per cent drop in vocabulary leading into Christie’s penultimate novel Elephants Can Remember. The Maclean’s article is a wonderful example of the potential for text analysis to be accessible and broadly relevant.