4get yr organs sci wants yr txts!

A new international research project called Texto4Science hopes to build a huge international database of text messages to analyze how they use language.

My friend Cam writes lovely haikus on his cell phone – so I humbly submit this tinymasterpiece of his to Patrick Drouin, the linguistics professor at U of M overseeing the North-American leg of this project. (It was written for his long-distance love, now wife.)

A haiku in tango steps, written in an airport while I wait for a flight to you…
uno, dos, trieze, quartro
on eight, I’ll make love to you,
cinco, seis, siete.

“There is great creativity stemming from the need to communicate succinctly and quickly, which is what my team plans to study,” says Drouin, who is currently pleading 4 yr texts. Drouin says text messaging, or SMS, is a growing phenom that has provoked great debate among linguists.

He wants to ask: Is it poorly written or a parallel code? Is the code similar and does it use the same logic from one continent to the next? From one region to the next? And how do people living in a multilingual environment communicate?

The project launched at the Université Catholique de Louvain(UCL) in Belgium in 2004 as sms4science, but is called Texto4Science in Canada. It's being led by the Université de Montréal in collaboration with the University of Ottawa and Simon Fraser University.

The research team hopes to collect 300,000 French text messages between November 2009 and April 30, 2010. Phase two of the project will study English text messages, and begins in 2010. Participants are asked to forward text messages that they have sent to other cell phones to a short code number: 202202. Texters can then complete the online form at www.texto4science.ca.