My topics for MALLET were really interesting, and I think that they say a lot about Sherlock Holmes as a whole. One of the first ones I came across was one that I entitled “Evidence.” This category had words like “Facts,clear, theory, possibly…” and many others. The importance of this category to the Sherlock Holmes stories cannot be understated. Obviously, to a detective, evidence is a pretty important thing. I found many other categories which one would expect to find in detective stories (e.g. Crime and Investigation) but some of the others were a little more interesting. Take for example a category I named “Manliness.” This category had words like “pipe, fire, smoke, tobacco, armchair, cigar” and “brandy.” Just from these words alone, one can get the image of a wax mustachioed man, sipping brandy and smoking a pipe by the fireside. While this is not exactly how anyone in the Sherlock Holmes’ stories is portrayed, it does have a certain feel that you get from these stories– an almost Rudyard Kipling type ambiance. Another big category i noticed, I named “Transportation.” In it were words like “train, station, carriage, cab, drive, waiting” and “journey.” I think that this category illustrates that transportation is a big part of the stories, and also shows that there is not just one was of getting around that the stories focuses on. Sherlock and Watson use train, automobile, walking, carriage, and almost any other type of transportation that you can imagine. They are always going somewhere. These were the most interesting and telling categories I discovered with the MALLET tool, and upping the number of words in the categories really did help with creating some more unique categories. Overall, I really enjoyed using MALLET, and look forward to using it in the future.

~Austin Carpentieri