I recently came across an interesting book. Detailed information follows. It would seem (to me) to have interesting implications for anonymous remailers. Does anyone on the list have any knowledge of this subject? I've seen it hinted at, but never systematically explored. In particular, does anyone know how it has advanced since the book was written (1978)? Additional references? Dana W. Albrecht dwa@corsair.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Morton, A. Q. (Andrew Queen) Literary detection : how to prove authorship and fraud in literature and doc uments / A. Q. Morton. [Epping, Eng.] : Bowker, c1978. xiii, 221 p. ; 25 cm. LC CALL NUMBER: PN171.F6 M64 SUBJECTS: Authorship, Disputed. Language and languages--Style. Linguistics--Statistical methods. DEWEY DEC: 801/.959 NOTES: Includes index. Bibliography: p. 221. ISBN: 0859350622 : L10.50 LCCN: 79-310591 r85 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Contents List of Tables vii List of Figures xi Preface xiii SECTION I THE THEORY OF STYLOMETRY 1. The Problems of Identification and Recognition 3 2. The First Steps 19 3. Statistics and Stylometry 29 4. Statistics as Description 40 5. The Second Stage in Statistical Description 51 6. Like or Unlike? The Statistics of Comparisons 71 7. The Rules of the Game 75 SECTION II THE FEATURES OF LANGUAGE WHICH ARE OF PARTICULAR INTEREST IN STYLOMETRY 8. The Writer in his Works 95 9. The Inflected Language 108 (i) Positional Measurements and Word Mobility 109 (ii) Isotropic Distributions 114 (iii) Anistropic Distributions 121 10. The Uninflected Language 130 11. The Occurrence of Proportional Word Pairs 147 SECTION III APPLICATIONS 12. Introductory 153 13. The Homeric Problem 158 14. The Authorship of the Pauline Epistles 165 15. The Shakespeare Problems 184 16. The Inimitable Jane 189 17. A Word from Baker Street 192 18. Let Justice be Done 195 CONCLUSION 208 Appendix 211 Glossary 215 Bibliography 221 Index 223 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (From page 7) The main subject of this book is one special aspect of identification, the determination of the authorship of texts. Since the development of photography it has been a simple matter to determine who wrote or who typed out a text. It is even possible to demonstrate which instrument was used in the writing or typing. But such physical comparisons do not indicate who composed the text or altered it from its original form. To enable this to be done a descriptive science known as stylometry is needed. Stylometry is the science which describes and measures the personal elements in literary or extempore utterances, so that it can be said that one particular person is responsible for the composition rather than any other person who might have been speaking or writing at that time on the same subject for similar reasons. Stylometry deals not with the meaning of what is said or written but how it is being said or written. Stylometry does not deal with the evidential value of statements. It does not asked whether this or that particular statement is true or reasonable, but applies itself to the question, 'In whose words are these sentiments expressed?' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Conclusion Looking back, the development of stylometry is easy to see. De Morgan was the first to point out the pattern of argument which should be used in stylometry, statistics would describe samples and sampling differences would become the measure of similarity or difference. But to suggest that something might well be true and to show that is is true are two different propositions and it was a long time before anyone actually developed a statistical test of authorship. It should have been done by Udny Yule in his book, _The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary_, but he made an unfortunate error in calculating the standard errors of sentence length distributions with the result that it was not until W.C. Wake corrected the error and continued his study of sentence length distributions of Greek authors in 1946 and 1957 that a reliable test was established. With the pattern of argument confirmed, attention then turned to what should be counted and analysed. Like all his colleagues, the author spent some time looking at those features of style which literary critics had noted and used as the basis for their judgements. This was making stylometry the conversion of stylistic description into quantitative terms; it was using the accumulated experience of scholars as it had been expressed in traditional forms. This proved to be an unexciting quest. In some cases, for example the suggestion of Sir Kenneth Dover that the number of finite verbs used by a writer of Greek prose might be an indicator of authorship, it turned out to be valid but required samples impracticably large for any New Testament application, and in others it soon became clear that the observations had no firm foundation in any objective data. It was the realisation that in Greek writing position was of prime importance that gave stylometry its first general theory. That such a theory was justified was confirmed when a dramatic plea for help with a police statement written in modern English posed a problem which was rapidly solved by an adaptation of positional methods to the constraints of an uninflected language. In Greek where word movement is free, look at word movement and position; in English where word movement is restricted, look at immediate context. There is so much material available that routine applications of stylometry will present few problems. What remain intractable are problems of mixed tests where one writer has been revised by another or other situations in which the homogeneity of the text is in doubt. Immediate progress seems likely to be made in two directions. Both concern the efficiency of methods rather than the further development of methods. A simple way to increase the separation of two authors is to combine a number of tests in multi-variate statistics. Properly done this will generate figures which show vast differences where such exist, although the differences are diffused throughout a number of statistics and are nowhere to be seen as clearly as the measure of their combined effect. The difficulty is that multi-variate statistics can conceal the underlying features and in some instances lead to confusion or misapprehension. One such set of statistics showed the differences between brands of cigarettes and showed very large differences. But a study of the statistics which were combined in the analysis revealed that the largest differences concerned the packing and the printing on the packets. While this might be useful for anyone designing a machine to select brands and sort them automatically, it was much less useful for any smoker who wanted to know about the quality of the cigarette. The other development which is easy to forecast is the formation of profiles of individual writers so that quick reference and resolution of problems will be possible. One way of doing this is to start with a set of collocations. It might be that after "and" a writer is very fond of using "the" and hardly ever uses "so." This can be made a test of how often "the" after "and" occurs compared to "so" after "and". The combination of a few such tests based upon the personal maxima and minima of an author will soon provide a measure by which he can be detected in a large number of candidates. The ultimate aim has been set by the information theory experts who, many years ago, calculated that in any 200 words, written or spoken, there was enough information to enable their author to be picked out of the human race. This is like saying that every cubic mile of sea water contains twenty tons of gold; it may be there but getting it out is not easy. But the aim must be to be able to say of any couple of hundred words, it is or is not the sole production of the person who produced this other sample. It may seem that we are a long way from being able to do so, but how much nearer we have come in the last twenty years. Who will say that the next twenty years will not produce the desired result? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------