It can be considered per form of style-based document authentication (Echtheitskritik), which has valuable applications that extend well beyond the domain of literary analysis, onesto, for instance, the domain of forensic sciences. According onesto Stamatatos’s 2009 survey of the field, ‘[t]he main intenzione behind statistically or computationally-supported authorship attribution is that by measuring some textual features we can distinguish between texts written by different authors.’22 22 E. Stamatatos, ‘A survey‘ (n. 14, above) 538. This basic assumption implies that it should be possible esatto assess, for any new unseen document, whether or not it was written by other authors for whom we have texts available. Nowadays computational authorship studies are often considered verso subfield of stylometry in the digital humanities, the broader computational study of the writing style of texts.23 23 D. Holmes, ‘The evolution of stylometry mediante humanities scholarship‘, LLC 13 (1998) 111–17.
While stylometry has per rich history, dating back puro at least the nineteenth century, it is clear that it received its most important impetus only sopra the past two or three decades, stimulated by the rise of (personal) computing and the increased availability of large bodies of text in electronic form.