The linguistics of authorship recognition

[Brian Brinkman]

No: HPFGUIDX 120603


The quest for real posts from JKR is interesting for several 
reasons.  The "mooseming" author has a unique voice that comes 
across in her (or his) posts.  The author writes like one who has a 
strong sense of her audience.  Not everyone can do that.

A few things worth considering:
1. "Google" Jo Sturgess.  I did and found one interesting hit, an 
archaeologist from the UK.  The writer of the Mooseming posts wrote 
like someone with a professional or graduate-level education.  An 
trained archaeologist would fill the bill.  I'm almost afraid to 
write this, but I think "mooseming" wrote like someone with a bit 
more education than JKR.  One hitch to this comment is that the 
posts I saw contained a few typos and errors of omission.  

2. One thing that supports the possibility of JKR being "mooseming" 
is that this member has been sporadic in her/his posts.  Almost 
anyone who saw a discussion taking place regarding posts he/she 
authored would want to chime in and take the credit (or at least 
solve the mystery).  Jo Sturgess could be a member who doesn't check 
the board very often, someone who stopped checking the board 
completely, or someone who is keeping a low profile.

3. It's hard to imagine JKR referring to herself in third person or 
using the diction "my son."  The closest thing I've seen to such 
diction is when she has the figures outside of the staff lounge call 
Harry "Sunny Jim" in OOTP.

4. There are some recognized ways to do authorship recognition 
studies.  In my own graduate work I use my faculty advisor's 
Vocabulary Management Profiles program to check for word usage 
(hapax legmena, type/token ratio, etc).  The website is an academic 
one (that is, not for profit) and is:
www.missouri.edu/~youmansc/vmp/
You might consider getting some mooseming text, then finding a bit 
of comparable wording from JKR, say, transcript from a chat or 
interview, then comparing relevant statistics.  You can also do a 
qualitative analysis that looks at sentence structure (e.g. Does the 
author use lots of coordination or subordination? What kinds of 
punctuation show up? Are there any words/usages unusual enough to be 
called idiosyncratic for a particular author?).

I might give this a try myself when I get tired of doing my own work 
or, I might just give the archaeologist Jo Sturgess and E-mail and 
see if she'll 'fess up!

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!
Brian Brinkman