Computational Stylistics and Stylometry

Computational stylistics is a subfield of stylistics in literary studies, extending traditional methods through computational means. We reconstruct its history by focusing on the field of stylometry, which statistically analyzes linguistic patterns to provide authorship attribution and to study literary texts in a “distant reading” perspective. We present the main stylometric methods by focusing on the used features (e.g., character n-grams and function words) and on the different analysis techniques (e.g., distance measures and machine learning), considering also keyness analysis methods. We conclude the chapter by showing how research in stylometry promotes a fusion of computational and traditional literary studies.