Stylometry
Using measurable features of writing — function-word frequencies, sentence lengths, punctuation — to profile authorship.
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Stylometric analysis uses measurable features of writing — function- word frequencies, sentence lengths, punctuation patterns — to profile authorship. Because function words (the, of, but, if) are used unconsciously, they tend to fingerprint an author more reliably than content words.
Why it matters for your research. In corpora with anonymous, pseudonymous, or disputed authorship — political pamphlets, newspaper columns, epistolary collections — stylometry can argue for or against attributions. It rarely proves anything on its own, but it strengthens or weakens cases built on other evidence.
In Archēglyph. On the roadmap as an authorship- attribution plugin. Only useful when the corpus has enough per- candidate text to make the feature distributions stable.
Not to be confused with. Topic modelling, which surfaces what documents are about; stylometry surfaces how they’re written.