The New Journal of Physics, a publication co-owned by the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society, has published a research which describes a new concept from a group of Swedish physicists from the Umeå University. Called the meta book, the concept uses the frequency with which authors use new words in their literature to trace distinct patterns in authors’ written styles.
Using literature written by Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence and Herman Melville, the physicists have developed a formula to detect different authors’ literary ‘fingerprints’.
For more than 75 years, George Kingsley Zipf’s maxim, based on a carefully selected compilation of American English called Brown Corpus, suggested a universal pattern for the frequency of new words used by authors. Zipf’s law suggests that the frequency ranking of a word is inversely proportional to its occurrence. New research, however, suggests that the truth behind word frequency is less universal than Zipf asserted and has more to do with the author’s linguistic ability than any over-arching linguistic rule.
The researchers first found that the occurrence of new words in the texts by Hardy, Lawrence and Melville did begin to drop off in their texts as their books got longer, despite new settings and plot-twists. Their evidence also showed, however, that the rate of unique word drop-off varied for different authors and, most significantly, was consistent across the entire works of any one of the three authors they analysed.
The statistical analysis was applied to entire novels, sections from novels, complete works and amalgamations from different works by the same authors – they all had a unique word-frequency ‘fingerprint’.
By using the statistical patterns evident from their study, the researchers have pondered the idea of a meta-book – a code for each author which could represent their entire work, completed or in the mental pipeline.
The researchers’ paper is available for free online at http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/11/12/123015.
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