Physicists develop a formula to determine authorship
Using the books of Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence and Herman Melville, Swedish physicists have developed a formula that analyzes different writing styles and texts in order to calculate what they call an author’s “literary footprint.” Published in the New Journal of Physics, the concept uses the frequency with which writers use new words in their literature to find distinct patterns in styles. The formula, which equates linguistic style with linguistic ability, also uses the speed at which this drops off as their books progress. Their evidence shows that the rate of unique word drop-off varies for different authors and, most significantly, is consistent across the entire works of any one of the three authors they analyzed. The statistical analysis was applied to entire novels, sections from novels, complete works and amalgamations from different works by the same authors—they all had a unique word-frequency ‘fingerprint’. The physicists believe the calculation could be used to end disputes over literary authorship and discover lost works by famous writers.