Stylometry

According to the article Introduction to stylometry with Python by François Dominic Laramée:

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Stylometry is the quantitative study of literary style through computational distant reading methods. It is based on the observation that authors tend to write in relatively consistent, recognizable and unique ways. For example: - Each person has their own unique vocabulary, sometimes rich, sometimes limited. Although a larger vocabulary is usually associated with literary quality, this is not always the case. Ernest Hemingway is famous for using a surprisingly small number of different words in his writing, which did not prevent him from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. - Some people write in short sentences, while others prefer long blocks of text consisting of many clauses. - No two people use semicolons, em-dashes, and other forms of punctuation in the exact same way. The ways in which writers use small function words, such as articles, prepositions and conjunctions, has proven particularly telling. In a survey of historical and current stylometric methods, Efstathios Stamatatos points out that function words are “used in a largely unconscious manner by the authors, and they are topic-independent.” For stylometric analysis, this is very advantageous, as such an unconscious pattern is likely to vary less, over an author’s corpus, than his or her general vocabulary. (It is also very hard for a would-be forger to copy.) Function words have also been identified as important markers of literary genre and of chronology.

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Stylometry concepts

Temple University Libraries states about Stylometry: {{Cquote|Like many strategies in the digital humanities, stylometry combines traditional close reading alongside more distant reading.

Close reading

In literary criticism, close reading describes a sustained attention to the text, looking at word choice, syntax, and particular images, to reveal meaning. This methodology came out of New Criticism and does not rely on historical or biographical research, intending to analyze the complexities of the individual text instead. Distant reading

This is a concept coined by Franco Moretti that suggests that looking at the wider scope of literature, through larger computational or archival methods, can help us see larger trends and reveal previously obscured systems within literary study.

See also

• Literary criticism