J.K. Rowling was recently revealed to have written The Cuckoo's Calling, under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith (NeoGAF thread). Before The Times ran the story after receiving a tip about it, they investigated and got some help analyzing the book.
Not necessarily groundbreaking stuff, but certainly an interesting read, especially for anybody interested in language. The analysis wasn't unanimously saying it was J.K. Rowling, but she was the most consistent result.
From PopSci:
Language Log (University of Pennsylvania)
And a follow-up:
Not necessarily groundbreaking stuff, but certainly an interesting read, especially for anybody interested in language. The analysis wasn't unanimously saying it was J.K. Rowling, but she was the most consistent result.
From PopSci:
The Cuckoo's Calling, a detective novel by first-time author Robert Gailbraith, just got solved in a big way. This weekend, the U.K.'s The Times reported The Cuckoo's Calling was actually written by J. K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter. Rowling even admitted to writing the novel after The Times asked her directly.
Among the evidence The Times presented to Rowling were analyses from two university professors who had written computer programs to uncover who authored disputed texts. After all, every writer has her habits. One obvious one is the use of regional wordsa car "boot" versus a "trunk," for examplebut others are much more subtle and unconscious. It's totally creepy, but cool, that a computer program is able to pick them out.
The Times originally asked the programmers to check The Cuckoo's Calling out after receiving an anonymous tip that Rowling might be the book's true author. The Times reporter, Alexi Mostrous, didn't initially let the professors know why he wanted them to compare The Cuckoo's Calling to several other novels.
So what habits give authors away? One of the analyzers, Patrick Juola of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, has written a detailed blog post about how his program works. The full post is a great read, but here are the highlights.
Basically, Juola got a digital copy of The Cuckoo's Calling, plus digital copies of novels by Rowling and three well-known authors of mystery novels. He then ran a series of analyses that told him which of the authors the habits in The Cuckoo's Calling matched best. Each analysis looked at a different "habit" in the books:
- Juola looked at the distribution of word lengths in each book. That is, he got a bunch of numbers like, "X percent of the words in this book are exactly Y letters long."
- Juola looked at the 100 most common words in each book.
- He looked at pairs of words that often appeared together.
- He looked at groups of four characters that appear in a string. Any four characters in a string may do, including letters, spaces and grammatical marks. Now, I don't know of any writers that ever think about character strings in their writing, but, Juola said, other studies have proven four-character strings, called four-grams, are strong indicators of authorship.
Juola's overall analysis isn't able to prove authorship, he said. Some of the individual tests found authors other than Rowling were the best match. Nevertheless, Rowling came up the most consistently. Juola called his work "suggestive" or "indicative" that Rowling wrote The Cuckoo's Calling. The smoking gun came from Rowling's confession, which Juola's analysis surely helped convince her to give.
The distinction matters because linguists use tools like Juola's and others' to determine who actually wrote everything from historical texts by long-dead authors to contested documents in modern court cases. In those cases, it can be a lot harder to get a ready, reliable confession.
Language Log (University of Pennsylvania)
And a follow-up:
Patrick Juola's guest post on identifying the authorship of The Cuckoo's Calling (now number 1 in the Amazon hardback bestseller list) was fascinating. But I seem to be the only person in the world who picked up the secret message that Joanne "J. K." Rowling sent when she picked the pseudonym under which she would publish her first crime novel. It is amazing that no one else picked up on it, but there we are: it was just me. I saw it as soon as well, as soon as the Sunday Times revealed their discovery of the novel's pseudonymous nature, actually, which is not quite as good as seeing it before the story was all over the newspapers, but I still think I deserve a lot of credit for my penetrating intelligence. I can't imagine why I don't do crosswords; I'd probably win prizes.
The clue was in the collocations of the surname. The most famous Galbraith in the whole of Rowling's lifetime, without any reasonable doubt, was John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian liberal economist, US diplomat under Kennedy, and professor of economics at Harvard. Initials: J. K. Now that I've pointed it out, how could you have missed it? Kick yourself.
P.S. It has been pointed out to me that there has sort of been some sort of flicker of recognition in the Twittersphere, e.g. here for example; but pooh to that. People always try to steal truly great insights, if necessary by reversing the unidirectional flow of time, and this is just one more example of such anti-temporal party-pooping.