Abstract

Here's a project where you can try your hand at being a detective with your computer. In this project you'll write a program to do some basic analysis of features of written text (for example, counting the length of each word in the text, or the number of words in each sentence). Then you'll see if you can use the information from your text analysis program to find measurements that can distinguish one author from another. After analyzing known samples of several authors' writings, can your method match up unidentified writing samples with their correct authors?

Objective

The goal of this project is to write a computer program to make some simple measurements on a block of text, and then to see if this information can be used to identify the author of the text.

Introduction

Your English teacher has probably told you that every author has an individual writing style—their own unique 'voice' on the page. Is it possible to find ways to identify that voice through computer analysis of written text?

A familiar case from history argues that it is indeed possible. When our forefathers, newly independent from Great Britain, were debating whether to do away with the Articles of Confederation and adopt the new Constitution written by a convention in Philadelphia, a series of essays was written to argue in favor of adopting the new government. These essays, now called The Federalist Papers, were signed "Publius," but are now attributed to Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The authorship of 12 of the essays was claimed by both Hamilton and Madison. As Julie Rehmeyer writes in a recent Science News article (Rehmeyer, 2007): "Altogether, researchers have considered more than 1,000 features of writing style. Nearly all the analyses have vindicated Madison."

Relax, you won't need to analyze 1,000 different features for your science fair project. The Science Buddies project, Paragraph Stats: Writing a JavaScript Program to 'Measure' Text, shows you how to write a simple program to measure:

1. the number of sentences contained in the text,
2. the number of words in each sentence,
3. the number of letters in each word,
4. the average number of words per sentence, and
5. the average word length.

With some simple modifications to the program, you can count the frequency of each word length and each sentence length in the text. Is this enough information to identify authorship? Try it and find out!

Terms and Concepts

To do this project, you should do research that enables you to understand the following terms and concepts:

• Frequency
• Frequency histogram

Questions

• How would you calculate the frequency of five-letter words in a given block of text?

Materials and Equipment

To do this experiment you will need the following materials and equipment:

• Computer with web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox)
• Text editing program (e.g., Notepad)
• Several samples of text by each of three (or more) authors, for example:
  • Sample paragraphs from books by different authors
  • E-mail or instant messages from friends
• Spreadsheet program (e.g., Excel or QuattroPro)
• Graph paper or graphing software
• A helper

Experimental Procedure

Variations

Careers

If you like this project, you might enjoy exploring these related careers:

Related Links

• Science Fair Project Guide
• Other Ideas Like This
• Computer Science Project Ideas
• My Favorites

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