Fingerprinting the mind

Abstract Until recently the identification of the authorship of written works has—like that of paintings—been largely subjective, but the application of the computer to analysis of literary structure has opened up important new possibilities. It has shown that simple frequency patterns are of much less diagnostic value than groupings of words and their position in sentences. Stylometry, as this new investigative method is called, has the merit of knowing no language barriers—it is equally applicable, for example, to classical Greek, English, and Swedish.