{"id":7875,"date":"2019-06-06T09:58:25","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T13:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagehat.com\/?p=7875"},"modified":"2025-10-22T16:37:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T20:37:09","slug":"punctuation-identification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/punctuation-identification\/","title":{"rendered":"Punctuation Identification."},"content":{"rendered":"

Alexandra N. M. Darmon, Marya Bazzi, Sam D. Howison, and Mason Porter have written a paper<\/a> on “textual analysis via punctuation sequences”:<\/p>\n

Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in “stylometry”, the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound and fury (signifying nothing)?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I confess the cutesy style of that last sentence irritates me, but so do the giggly styles of today’s newscasters and interviewers — I’m an old fossil used to solemnity in public utterances. But never mind that; they’ve created a web app<\/a> that will compare the punctuation style of any writing sample to the authors in its database, and of course it’s fun to put in samples and get results. The problem is that the results are essentially meaningless. To quote verstegan at MetaFilter<\/a> (where I got the link):<\/p>\n

It doesn’t inspire confidence in the authors’ methodology that they analyse Shakespeare’s punctuation without, apparently, being aware that this varies enormously from edition to edition. Ever since the time of Samuel Johnson, editors have freely repunctuated<\/a> the text of Shakespeare. The claim that (to take one example) ‘Shakespeare appears to use more exclamation marks and question marks than H.G. Wells’ is thus completely meaningless.<\/p>\n

The same goes for most of the earlier texts in their sample, as they are using public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, many of which will have been repunctuated. In other words, their text corpus is totally contaminated and their claims about ‘the evolution of punctuation marks over time’ are completely untenable. (And that’s even before we get into the question of whether the punctuation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century books reflects authors’ preferences or printers’ house styles ..) I’m afraid this is what happens when four mathematicians write a paper without bothering to consult any literary scholars, textual editors or bibliographers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sigh. But enjoy the game, as long as you realize it doesn’t mean anything!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexandra N. M. Darmon, Marya Bazzi, Sam D. Howison, and Mason Porter have written a paper on “textual analysis via punctuation sequences”: Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in “stylometry”, the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7875"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18542,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875\/revisions\/18542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}