Revealing words."Bookish Math: Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries" (SN: 12/20&27/03, p. 392) skipped one of the most significant methods for analyzing text for authorship. On March 11, 1887, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (October 4, 1841 – March 23, 1924) was an autodidact US physicist and meteorologist. Life Mendenhall was born in Hanoverton, Ohio to Stephen Mendenhall, a farmer and carriage-maker, and Mary Thomas, and married Susan Allan Marple in 1870. reported in Science a straightforward method of plotting word length versus frequency. The beauty of this method is that it doesn't depend upon the exercise of judgment on the part of the investigator. DONALD BICKLER, TEMPLE CITY, CALIF. The article immediately reminded me of the Unabomber's manifesto, and how people familiar with Ted Kaczynski's prior writings may have seen clues in the manifesto pointing to him. MARK SOWA SOWA Special Olympics Washington SOWA Service Order Work Aid , DOWNERS GROVE, ILL. Thanks for demonstrating that literary stylometry Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language. In the last few years it has successfully been applied also to music and to fine-art paintings. Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents. has progressed far beyond intuition and type-token ratios. In my work on forensic author identification, I have been able to distinguish authors of documents with as few as 200 words by focusing on syntactic rather than lexical units. It may be natural for the literati literati Scholars in China and Japan whose poetry, calligraphy, and paintings were supposed primarily to reveal their cultivation and express their personal feelings rather than demonstrate professional skill. to focus on vocabulary, but psychological principles of language processing also support the focus on syntactic units in forensic and information retrieval applications Areas where information retrieval techniques are employed include (the entries are in alphabetical order within each category): General applications of information retrieval
CAROLE CHASKI, GEORGETOWN, DEL. Statistical analyses were applied many years ago to biblical texts in attempts to establish the origins of various books. It would be interesting indeed to see if the new computerized methods would support that earlier work. Scholarship such as this would be much more useful than the Bible-code nonsense. VIRGIL H. SOULE, FREDERICK, MD. It would be gratifying grat·i·fy tr.v. grat·i·fied, grat·i·fy·ing, grat·i·fies 1. To please or satisfy: His achievement gratified his father. See Synonyms at please. 2. to use text analysis to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, subjective writing from objective writing, true from false, science from pseudoscience pseu·do·sci·ence n. A theory, methodology, or practice that is considered to be without scientific foundation. pseu . Or would it be horrifying? JOHN W. MATHEWSON, MERCER ISLAND, WASH. The article should also have considered the possibility of cumulative sum analysis, a technique admissible as evidence in British courts. Also, the authorship of Royal Book of Oz has been ascribed to Thompson for decades. It is not really disputed, as your article implies. JAMES D. KEELINE, SAN DIEGO, CALIF. |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion