[Corpora-List] Forensic linguistics: advice sought

[Kevin B. Cohen]

2008/11/26 Tad Piotr <tad46ster at gmail.com>:
> Dear All,
> a colleague is writing her PhD thesis on farewell suicide notes, collected
> several hundred examples (in Polish) and would like to encode them
> electronically and to process them using corpus methods.
> The question is: do you know similar studies of modern European
> (IndoEuropean) languages? Are there any downloadable resources in the net?

There is a history of corpus-based approaches to the study of suicide
notes in English going back to the 1950s.  The classic book is "Clues
to Suicide," by Edwin Shneidman and Norman Farberow.  The next
book-length study is by Antoon Leenaars (yes, two Os, two Es, and two
As): "Suicide Notes: Predictive Clues and Patterns."  There's also a
really good review article, "Suicide Notes and Communications"--let me
know if you want more information on it, as I unfortunately don't have
the author's name handy and will have to hunt it down.

The most active researcher in this area today is John Pestian at
CCHMC.  You can reach him at jpestian at gmail.com.

Kev


-- 
K. B. Cohen
Biomedical Text Mining Group Lead, Center for Computational Pharmacology
and
Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer, The MITRE Corporation, Human
Language Technology Division
303-916-2417 (cell) 303-377-9194 (home)
http://compbio.uchsc.edu/Hunter_lab/Cohen

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