.. i win

[nq:1]"WINSOME" on 04july2003 : . . (T)ell me what the science is called used to determine if one author ... Bla v Sha situation. I believe that reoccurring patterns and semantics are studied in order to come to a conclusion.[/nq]
A question semanticly
distractingly put, so I investigated.
Of the ten garnered responses, all
were off:

from misc.writing, three

1.( Towse (Email Removed) ):

Forensic linguistics.
2.( (Email Removed) ):

There is software for it,
lately implicating writers
who open with "Call me
Ishmael."
3.( (Email Removed) ):

"Snitching."
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one from
microsoft.public.word.spelling.grammar

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4.( Doug Robbins - Word MVP (Email Removed) ):

Hi, I am not sure about the
science, but the act is call plagiarism.
Do a search on Google for more
information. Please respond to the
newsgroups for the benefit of others
who may be interested.
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from england.writing, six

5.( Puck ):

Cryptography?
6.( Geraldo (Email Removed) ):

Cryptography's codes and stuff.
I don't think it's anti-plagiarism,
but I've got no better suggestion.
Even looking here doesn't seem to
give the "science" a name
- http://www.plagiarism.org/technology1.html
7.( miss (Email Removed) ):

It's closely linked to the art
of "Cyphering" or "Discybering" - both
of which could also be what zy's looking
for. Zr original question confuses an
"art" with a "science" - but there's a
fine line, if one exists at all.
8.( Kay Sexton (Email Removed) ):

Comparate semantics?
9. ( Charles Riggs (Email Removed) ):

PPlagiarizology, sometimes spelled
plagiarisology, if copied wrong.
Education should open new doors for a
pon, and I think the specific details of
what zy learns in any given subject is
relatively unimportant.
10. ( JP Leleu (Email Removed)):

Why not "Comparative literary study"?
STYLOMETRY is the correct
answer.
STYLOMETRY analyzes styles not
only of writing, but also of music,
graphics, art, & architecture.
Linguistic stylometry has been called
the pseudo-scientific measurement
of individual use of language. In
contrast to, for example, searching for
cryptograms in Shak texts that would
point to Baco, stylometry involves
making statistical analyses of some
characteristics of literary style, of
the unconscious stylistic habits of
an author.
This means that each writer is
viewed as having an inherent style
that can serve as a literary fingerprint.
One pon's style of speaking or writing
cannot be copied by another. Shak cannot
write "Paradise Lost" nor Milt "Much Ado",
for it was the very self of each, in
propria persona, that gives these works
form & worth. Likewise, hyperbolic American
is not understated British English. A child
is not an adult.
Stylometrists study the usage
of words, written or verbal, in an
attempt to resolve problems of authorship
or chronology.
Mysteries of authorship result
from ghostwriting, pseudonyms, collaboration,
parody, editing, & plagiarism (careless
or as theft). In a sense, plagiarism
(presenting another's work as one's
own) is the inverse of forgery (presenting
one's own work as another's). Noble Kinspons
contains a line from a contemporaneous
Sonnet: "Lilies that fester smell far worse
than weeds." Was this Shak borrowing
from zmself, "memorial reconstruction",
or another writer stealing zr best
lines?
With growing computer power &
electronic versions of literary
works, the "appalling drudgery" otherwise
needed to carry out stylometric analysis
was overcome. So a Two Cultures view.
How many would recoil at the suggestion
that ineffable literary style could be
quanitified, captured by numbers. Stylometry
is the wielding of the scholarly scalpel by
statisticians, whereas most humanities
scholars cannot understand the complexities
of mathematical methods used, nor incline
to trust a scientific approach to their
own problems.
However, on the unit of analysis that
should be used in authorship studies
there is no general agreement.
Vocabulary, sentence length, the
number of three-letter words, the number
of words beginning with vowels, characteristic
use of commonplace word combinations are
all candidate.
Most researchers believe that common words
are of most value in characterising an
author's stylometric signature. So-called
function words, therefore, are studied, which
include conjunctions (and, so), prepositions
(on, upon), articles (an, the) and certain
verbs & adverbs.
Stylometrizing dates back to
the middle 19thC, in a long line of
literary detective escapades.
In 1901,
TC.Mendenhall reduced the concordances
of Shak & Baco to distributions
of word lengths & plotted these distributions
as graphs. Zr so-called "characteristic
curves" serve as an early example
of the use of graphics in distinguishing
authorship.
Williams (1940) analyzed the sentence
lengths of works by Chesterton,
Wells, & Shaw. Zy noticed that the log
of the number of words per sentence
appeared to follow a normal distribution.
Morton (1965) also used sentence length
in zr analysis of ancient Greek texts.
Computers have been used in stylometric
authorship studies since the 1960s.
This scientific stylometry is
based on the Cusum (Cumulated Sum
Analysis) method, the principle that
every writer has a unique verbal
"fingerprint", identifiable by computer
analysis.
After initially using criteria such as
word length & sentence length,
Mosteller/Wallace (1963) focused on using
function word counts (frequency distribution
of a few function words) to discriminate
between the works of Hamilton & Madison in
a seminal analysis of the Federalist Papers.
Indeed, Mosteller/Wallace opened the
modern, computerised age of
stylometry.
Diamond,A.M., & D.M.Levy:
"Stylometrics: Statistical Evidence of
the Decline in the Quality of Writing in
the Economics Profession." A paper presented
at the American Economic Association
meetings, Washington, D.C. 28dec1990.
These are some stylometry publications.
At the most advanced level, applying
neural networks to disputed works such
as The Two Noble Kinspons has produced
interesting results, and may help settle
bitter arguments over authorship of
controversial literary texts. Neural
networks have proved particularly useful
in classifying complex data in the presence
of statistical noise. This is akin to the
human brain's ability to pick out a face
in a crowd. Decreased by this technique
is reliance on potentially false assumptions
about the statistical properties of
data.
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