Authors and Writing

Abstract

Abstract This chapter introduces a range of approaches to the measurement and digital quantification of literary style: stylometry or digital stylistics. The chapter begins with a history of stylometric thinking, ranging from approximately 1851 through to contemporary multi-dimensional fingerprinting techniques, such as Burrows’s delta method. It then progresses to discuss close vs. large-scale literary reading and the problematic terminology of ‘distant reading’ (namely, that one can use computational techniques also to read closely, despite this also being a type of ‘distant’ reading). Further covered in this first chapter are analyses of genre and its lifecycles (Ted Underwood), approaches to poetry (Tanya E. Clement on Gertrude Stein), court cases that have turned on stylometry, the Mosteller and Wallace methods applied to the Federalist papers, stylistic analyses of Flann O’Brien and James Joyce (James O’Sullivan et al.), and authorship controversies (Don Foster’s infamous digital work on Shakespeare).