Radiolab - Vanishing Words

Agatha Christie's clever detective novels may reveal more about the inner workings of the human mind than she intended. In this podcast, a look at what scientists uncover when they treat words like data.

Duration: 16m
Broadcast on: 05 May 2010
Audio Format: other

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RIDILEB is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in. Any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Hey, I'm Jada Moenrod, this is Radio Lab, and today, just to start things off for this podcast, let's just say that you love an author. But somehow, the text isn't enough. It doesn't get you close enough to the author. So what do you do? You know what you do? But take off your shoes, you take off your stocks, and you stand on the book, and your whole body says, "Let me in." Let me give you a different flavor of that. Hello. How about you take the text, give it to this guy, he puts it into a computer, and you turn it into data. What do you mean, who is that? My name is Ian Leicacher, I'm a professor of English at the University of Toronto. Ian, as he said, is an English professor, but he's also a computer guy. Right, founded a computing center with the help of IBM Canada, and the reason he combines those two is because he's interested in the secrets behind the author's words. And that desire, he says, to take a text, spin it into data as a way to get into that author's head, well, that goes back a long way. It goes back to the fathers of the Christian church, to the Bible. In the early Middle Ages. Some monks decided to make what's called a concordance of the Bible, and what that means is they were going to take every single word in the Bible, and there are 960,243 of them, at least in the King James version, and they were going to list them all alphabetically, notate each time every single word was used and the context. Yes, imagine it, you begin with the first verse in the beginning. You create a heading for the first word in and then for the second word, the beginning. Every time you come across those words, you have to write a context in Genesis 1 verse 1, the current one in the beginning, Genesis 1 verse 6, verse 2, and God said, let there be permanent in them. It's all handwritten, and at the end you end, well, you end up with a lot of pieces of paper. So many that it took those first monks, who decided to do this an entire lifetime to complete it. Nowadays, with computers, you can be done in under 15 seconds. Bam! So that all just basically sets the stage for the story that I'm about to tell you. It's the 1980s, Ian is an English professor at Toronto, he's got a lab full of computers, and he's using them to analyze his favorite authors. Samuel, Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Cadman, Chaucer, Shakespeare. And he's starting up some interesting stuff, sort of. For example, in his poetry, Milton didn't use the word because.

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