Lancashire and Hirst

“Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie’s Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia:  A Case Study” is an interesting use of text mining in pursuit of a demonstration of possible evidence of dementia in the use and type of vocabulary over time.  The methods were sound, the case study compelling, and the results were, well, not conclusive, but some clues were found.

What screams out at me, however, if the study were done today, is just how useful it wound be to take the rows and columns of Figure 1 and import them to a visualization tool like Mondrian (I was planning to do just that right now as a demonstration, but my own computer is unavailable to me at the moment and I am working on a library computer).  With this type of tool it would be very easy to see relationships between age and word usage, and any interesting patterns might be made apparent almost immediately.

Is there any disadvantage to using Mondrian in a case like this?  I think not, especially as it would not detract from any of the existing analysis, but could be a valuable addition to the study.

Simple spreadsheet software such as Excel could also be used, but Mondrian allows for more interesting comparisons of different variables.