Academics David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, from the New School for Social Research in New York, put more than 1,000 participants through the "author recognition test", which measured exposure to fiction by asking respondents to identify writers they recognised from a list.
An online version of the Author Recognition Test (ART; Stanovich & West, 1989) was used to measure reading interest at ages 10 and 12.
However, using the Twins Early Development Study TEDSS; Haworth, Davis, & Plomin, 2013), we have previously found that individual differences in print exposure at age 10 as assessed by the Author Recognition Test (ART) are predicted by word reading fluency at age 7, assessed by the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE; Harlaar, Dale, & Plomin, 2007b).
This work is based on the authors' recognition that studies of inter- and intra-observer reproducibility and accuracy will require a conceptually simple metric that correlates to anatomic differences between 3D-printable STL models derived from medical images.
Zola's fourth novel, the first to win the author widespread recognition, it is still an early work, a mere foretaste of the later greatness of "Nana," "Germinal" or "L'Assommoir," and written decades before "J'Accuse," the author's famous 1898 open letter in defense of the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus at a time when anti-Semitism was dividing France.
The tools, which are still young, imperfect and buggy, build on existing author recognition tools like Signature, a program created by Peter Millican of Oxford University, and the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program, or JGAAP, a similar program designed by Patrick Juola of Duquesne University.
Important points are the need for: (1) good information flow, (2) transparent publication policies and mechanisms for author recognition, (3) harmonised data-sharing policies across countries and funders, (4) simplified procedures for data sharing and (5) the development of good technical tools that provide easy access to the data.
"We examined patterns of author recognition in two large (each more than 850) independent samples using a technique called factor analysis, and we found evidence of two clusters of authors that could be classified as generally literary or generally popular genre writers.," he said.
In these cases it is possible to use author recognition techniques to identify similarities.
From our point of view, it would make sense from an ethical perspective to use this kind of techniques for author recognition purposes in a cyber crime investigation involving a few suspects, while it would be much more questionable to use it on large scale in an inter-platform setting which would allow for general dredging of possible matches.
GCTA = genome-wide complex trait analysis; TOWRE = Test of Word Reading Efficiency; ART = Author Recognition Test.
