Spotlight on stylometric text analysis

Stylometry

Different authors have different writing styles. Like the lenght of words and sentence, the frequencies of word, the frequencies of word forms, the richness of vocabulary, the use of punctuation and on. The author can also have preferences for certain spelling variants or using certain expressions.

Stylometry is the study of measurable features of style.

The Story of the Phantom

The Story of the Phantom is a series of 15 novels, published by Avon Publications in the U.S. from 1972 to 1975, based on Lee Falk's Phantom stories. When released the adaptor of issues 2 and 10 was not credited, and issue 15 was credited as Carson Bingham. Lee Falk did correct this using an "Author's note" in the books.

Adapted by	issues	note
Basil Copper	2, 3	#2 The adaptor is not credited
Carson Bingham	14
Frank S. Shawn	4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11	#10 The adaptor is not credited
Lee Falk	1, 6, 9, 12, 15	#15 is wrongly credited as Carson Bingham
Warren Shanahan	13

Analysis

Stylometric analysis to see if Lee Falk's correction in the "Author's note" can been confirmed.

• MFW - most frequent words
• MFC - most frequent characters
• n-Grams - Sample for character 2-grams: The Phantom said = th,he,e , p,ph,ha,an,nt, etc. Sample for word 2-grams: Hello, the Phantom said = hello the,the phantom,phantom said, etc.
• Corpus - collection of text. Here the 15 novels, from chapter 1 to the end of the novel.

Using JGAAP

The novels were prepared adding the novels to each of the authors, leaving issues 2, 10 and 15 as unknown authors. Using character 4-grams with nearest neighbor driver with metric Cosine Distance, issues 2, 10 and 15 were compared to the known authors.

The result were that the most likly author for: #2 is Basil Cooper, #10 is Frank S Shawn and #15 is Lee Falk.

Using R

The novels were put into one corpus folder. Two analysis were done: first 0-902 MFW 2-gram and the second 0-902 MFC 3-grams. Both using the Boostrap Consensus Tree.

The result grouping the novels according to the table above, confirming Lee Falk's correction in the "Author's note".

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  MFW 2-gram

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  MFC 3-gram

Interesting the analysis grouping issues 13 and 14 with statistic similar style.

WWII

Without giving further details, Alfred Bester told that he ghosted Falk’s strips during the WWII years. Lee Falk worked for OWI early 1942 to August 1943. He then wrote the "Passionate Congressman" and several scripts for his newspaper characters, before he was enlisted as private in the army in March 1944 (to about mid 1945).

The Phantom Sundays

The text in the comic strips are a bit different than the previous novels. In the novels the dialogues looking about this: "Hello," said the Phantom. But in the Sunday stories the speech bubble are more like this: Hello!

PS	Start	Finish	Weeks	Story Title	note
ps-002	22.10.1939	10.03.1940	21	"The Precious Cargo of Colonel Winn"
ps-003	17.03.1940	21.07.1940	19	"The Fire Goddess"
ps-004	28.07.1940	29.12.1940	23	"The Beachcomber"
ps-005	05.01.1941	23.02.1941	8	"The Saboteurs"
ps-006	02.03.1941	22.02.1942	52	"The Return of the Sky Band"
ps-007	01.03.1942	11.10.1942	33	"The Impostor"	at OWI
ps-008	18.10.1942	18.04.1943	27	The Marshall Sisters Pt.1: "Castle in the Clouds"	at OWI
ps-009	25.04.1943	04.07.1943	11	The Marshall Sisters Pt.2: "The Ismani Cannibals"	at OWI
ps-010	11.07.1943	25.06.1944	51	The Marshall Sisters Pt.3: "Hamid the Terrible"	at OWI
ps-011	02.07.1944	07.01.1945	28	"The Childhood of the Phantom"	in the army
ps-012	14.01.1945	24.06.1945	24	"The Golden Princess"	in the army
ps-013	01.07.1945	02.12.1945	23	"The Strange Fisherman"	in the army ?
ps-014	09.12.1945	17.03.1946	15	"Queen Pera the Perfect"

Using R

The text from the Sundays (2-14) were put into one corpus folder. Two analysis were done: first 0-902 MFW 2-gram and the second 0-902 MFC 3-grams. Both using the Boostrap Consensus Tree.

The result for the MFW 2-grams grouping all stories close in writing style. The MFC 3-grams shows a slightly larger variation, but this is most likely due to the ammount of dialogues from different characters in the stories.

The analysis shows no clear indication that anyone other than Lee Falk was the author of these stories.

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  MFW 2-gram

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  MFC 3-gram