CanLit-1

In recent years Canadian writers have won nearly every major international literary award, and a recent publication, The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada*, reflects their diversity. This book was too rich a resource for me to leave alone and so I scavenged it from cover to cover obtaining 1357 names of writers who have earned their reputation in Canada over the past 400 plus years. The Encyclopedia lists each individual as a poet, author, writer, journalist, playwright, novelist, historian etc. but I have put them in a single grouping for the purpose of the project. You may be interested in the actual breakdown. I, for one, had no idea that Canada had produced so many published poets. Here are some of the categories used in the encyclopedia with the number of individuals so classified.

*The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada was published in 2002 by the University of Toronto Press; edited by W. H. New, Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Professor New was the editor of Canadian Literature from 1977 to 1994, and has written and edited over thirty books, including anthologies, literary criticism, children's books, and poetry. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 1986.

Some of the individuals listed in the Encyclopedia were not born in Canada but all of them earned their literary reputations as Canadians. Included in the Encyclopedia with their name and accomplishments is their city and date of birth as supplied by each individual. I did not check other sources to see if each of them was truthful about their age, I have used the information as supplied by them.

Each name, city and date of birth was typed into WinStar Plus** software which produced a very accurate heliocentric display showing the positions of the planets around the Sun on the date of the birth. Since the time of birth was not provided, I used noon local time for all charts. The sector position of each planet was then entered into Microsoft Access database for later analysis. In total there were 1357 individuals used in this study. The earliest entry was for poet Robert Hayman, born August 14, 1575.

Once all the heliocentric heliograms were produced and the planetary information entered into Microsoft Access the real fun began. It is always exciting to take a look at new material, never before published work. This project was particularly exciting for me because of the size of it, the largest project completed at the CD-B as of October 2003.

** WinStar Plus computer program was created by the very talented people at Matrix Software in Big Rapids, Michigan. A link to them can be found on the LINKS page.

A heliogram is an accurate two dimensional construction of the positions of the planets around the Sun for a particular day, month, year, and time. The view of the planets is as if one were looking outward from the Sun. The Earth is included in this view. The planets included in this study are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. I divided the space around the Sun into 12 equal sectors of 30° and the positions of the planets are noted by sector number and degree within the sector which can range from 0° to 29°.

The location of the Earth within the 12 sectors for the 1357 writers is shown in the table below.

SECTOR	COUNT	% OF TOTAL	RANK
1	113	8.3
2	105	7.7
3	102	7.5
4	119	8.8
5	94	6.9	low
6	106	7.8
7	116	8.5
8	129	9.5	1
9	112	8.3
10	127	9.4	2
11	113	8.3
12	121	8.9	3
TOTAL	1357	99.9%

Sector 8 has the largest count with 129 entries (9.5% of total), and sector 5 has the smallest count with 94 entries(6.9% of total).

It is widely stated that William Shakespeare is the greatest playwright known to humanity. Although the exact date of his birth is unknown it is commonly set for April 23, 1564. Records show that William was baptized on April 26, 1564 and the custom of the time was to baptize infants within a day or two of birth. The Earth was located at 12° of sector 8 on April 23, 1564.

Because the database for this project is the largest analyzed at the Cosmic Data-Bank thus far, it is also useful to go from a 12 sector circle around the Sun to a more revealing 36 sector circle around the Sun. Further dividing each of the 12 sectors into 3 more sub sectors of 10° gives a total of 36 sub sectors. For example, all the 12 sectors can be divided into sub sectors 1, 2 and 3, each of 10° as follows:

Using this method of division of the great circle into 36, 10° units, the highest counts for the position of the Earth are found in the following groupings of sectors (S) and sub sectors (ss).

The first example directly above illustrates that the last 10° of sector 7 and the first 20° of sector 8 gives a higher count (by 0.5%) for the Earth than the 30° total of sector 8 alone. Using 36, 10° sub sectors instead of only 12, 30° sectors has fine-tuned the Earth position and given another picture for us to ponder. The information is shown in graphic form below. It is easy to see that the maximum count is not within any one of the sectors but a combination of ss3 of S7 plus ss1 and ss2 of S8.

The small planet Mercury circles the Sun every 88 days and so in the 408 years of this study it would have circled the Sun at least 1,632 times. Mercury has an elliptical orbit around the Sun and does not spend the same amount of time in each sector. This has been factored into the results shown below:

SECTOR	COUNT	DAYS IN SECTOR	BIRTHS PER DAY	RANK
1	84	6	14.0
2	76	5	15.2
3	82	4	20.5	1
4	72	5	14.4
5	79	6	13.2	low
6	116	7	16.6	2
7	131	8	16.4
8	162	10	16.2
9	166	11	15.1
10	152	10	15.2
11	122	9	13.5
12	115	7	16.4
Totals	1,357	88

Mercury was found least often in sector 5 with the highest frequency of birth for Canadian writers found in sector 3.