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.
Analysis
The Avon Novels
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Lee Falk | 1, 6, 9, 12, 15 | #15 is wrongly credited as Carson Bingham |
| Basil Copper | 2, 3 | #2 The adaptor is not credited |
| Frank S. Shawn (pen name of Ron Goulart) | 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 | #10 The adaptor is not credited |
| Warren Shanahan | 13 | |
| Carson Bingham (pen name of Bruce Cassiday) | 14 |
Fratelli Spada - Prose stories
The Fratelli Spada - Prose stories
King Comics stories
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.
MFW 2-gram
MFC 3-gram
