Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature. David L. Hoover

Extract

Professor David L. Hoover, longtime contributor to Literary and Linguistic Computing and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities from 2001 to 2022, and a leading pioneer of stylometry, passed away in 2023. Hoover’s 2021 monograph, Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature, is “Dedicated to the memory of John F. Burrows,” who launched a new wave of stylometric studies, and this review, in turn, is dedicated to Hoover’s memory.

Numerous studies have successfully investigated how external factors leave—or don’t leave—observable signals in texts. Scholars have sought to correlate textual change with: authorial mental and physical states, such as dementia/Alzheimer’s disease (Garrard et al. 2005; Lancashire and Hirst 2009; Le et al. 2011; Hirst and Feng 2012); author’s age (Spencer et al. 2012; Kernot et al. 2019; Vogel 2021; Underwood et al. 2022); or education (So and Piper 2016). In this monograph, Hoover expands his own prior research to investigate whether, and to what extent, how an author physically writes—whether longhand, dictation, typewriter, or word processor—leaves stylometric traces. Hoover’s contribution is of both method and application and the summation of two decades of stylometric innovation. The methods applied include the, by now, well-established stylometric approaches based on the most frequent word frequencies, compared via a variety of clustering algorithms (e.g. Burrows 2002; Craig and Kinney 2009; Eder et al. 2016), along with Hoover’s innovations, for example “wide spectrum” method based on frequencies of all words (2013).