Hi all,

My apologies for x-posting this one.

I thought this could be of interest:

Frank

"Melvyn Bragg explores the latest revelations that computing and science are bringing to the way we use our language: using the latest computer-assisted research he discovers hitherto unrealised patterns in the way we use our language, both literary and spoken.

"Some forty years ago great hopes were raised in the literary community that the sort of routine mechanical analysis of literary texts (e.g. word counts and frequency of use of particular terms) that the advent of the computer and its ability to crunch large amounts of detail quickly and accurately could deliver were going to revolutionise study. Today, there’s a certain degree of scepticism. Some of the claims - like the computer-aided study that suggested that Sylvia Plath’s verse foreshadowed her suicide - have been greeted with ridicule in some quarters. Yet slowly but surely as the software becomes more sophisticated, major advances are being made.

"For ‘Inside English’, Melvyn goes inside the differences between spoken and written English to find out the way science is being roped in to analyse and then potentially change the way we use it."

Almost twenty-five years ago, I attended a silly, little convention at the University of Texas in Austin, where computer specialists were conducting research on computer-generated, intelligible English in Shakespeare’s idiolect.  At the time, I could easily discern that such efforts might only be regarded as amateurish, and it soon became obvious that nobody took this needy, little project too seriously.  For by utilizing a functional method, first of data inputting, then of lexical sequencing by individual character, word space and punctuation, program technicians seem to have provided the necessary template for the kind of research you just described, which has already yielded "fantastic" results, perhaps more advanced than the anemic & edentulous, Texas experiment, especially when you consider the long, long period intervening since.