The two analyses — one by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of
OrphAnalytics, a Swiss start-up; the other by the French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps — built on long-established forms of forensic linguistics that can detect telltale variations, revealing the same hand in two texts. In
writing the Federalist Papers, for example, James Madison favored “whilst” over “while,” and Alexander Hamilton tended to write “upon” instead of “on.”
Instead of relying on expert opinion, the computer scientists used a mathematical approach known as
stylometry. Practitioners say they have replaced the art of the older studies with a
new form of science, yielding results that are measurable, consistent and replicable.
Sophisticated software broke down the Q texts into patterns of three-character sequences and tracked the recurrence of each possible combination.
Their technique does not highlight memorable, idiosyncratic word choices the way that earlier forensic linguists often did. But the advocates of stylometry note that they can quantify their software’s error rate.
