Spotlight on stylometric text analysis - The Avon Novels
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".
MFW 2-gram
MFC 3-gram
Interesting the analysis grouping issues 13 and 14 with statistic similar style.