Literary greats leave their “fingerprints”

Is your writing style distinctive? Would people familiar with your work know you’re the author of a particular piece of writing if it didn’t have your byline?

We can think about this topic a little differently now, thanks to a team of Swedish researchers who are using a computer program to identify a book’s “literary fingerprint” – a fingerprint unique to the author who wrote it.

Here’s how it works.

As a book stretches in length, writers start running out of new words. The rate at which the introduction of new words drops off depends on the writer’s skill level. But that drop-off rate is always the same for each author, which is how the computer program identifies the author’s literary fingerprint.

The Swedish research team, headed by Sebastian Bernhardsson studied books and stories from literary greats Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. They concluded that inside each writer’s head is a “meta-book” that is the source they draw from while applying words to paper or computer screens.

The Swedes’ study, published in the New Journal of Physics, provides insight into the way language is used.

Bernhardsson and his team are planning to conduct similar research on other literary works and think it should eventually be possible to pick out an unidentified author from the “fingerprint” left by his or her words.

You can learn more about literary fingerprinting on this podcast at The Naked Scientists’ website.

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