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ways. In the chapter, we try to match blogs written today with those written many years ago by the same authors. This is much harder than matching blogs written by authors at about the same time. In fact, think back to the example of the twenty bloggers. Imagine we have, say, ten blog entries on consecutive days from each of the twenty people. We pull out one of the ten entries for each person and put this into a separate stack. The goal is to match the twenty “orphan” entries with the twenty bloggers by reading the nine blog entries of known authorship. Our computer does a much better job at guessing which orphan entry goes with which blogger. The overall hit rate is closer to 58 percent (where 5 percent is chance).

262–265 In addition to the work of Adair and of Mosteller and Wallace dealing with the Federalist Papers, be sure to see recent articles by Patric Juola (2006) and by Jeff Collins and his colleagues (2004).

265 Pardon me for a minute while I have a little chat with the twenty people on Earth who really, really want to know the methods for analyzing the Federalist Papers. The cross-validation approach is based on discriminant analyses assuming equal group size. The original function-word assignment method, which assigned all unknown texts to Madison, correctly classifed 92.4 percent of the original essays and 86.4 percent for cross-validation. The numbers for function words plus punctuation were 98.5 percent and 84.8 percent. Analyses based on the fourteen “tell” words used a binary procedure (was the word used or not within an essay) and yielded both classification and cross-validation accuracies of 98.5 percent. The one assignment error was for essay forty-one, which is attributed to Madison. The tell-word analyses estimated that Hamilton was the author of 49, 52 through 57, and 63, and that Madison was the author of 50, 51, and 62.

Whereas Hamilton claimed credit for all eleven of the unknown manuscripts, he reported that three additional ones were jointly written by Madison and himself. Madison’s later recollection was that he (Madison) had written them with some supplemental comments by Hamilton. All linguistic analyses show that the jointly written papers were completely different from either Hamilton’s or Madison’s solo-authored pamphlets. Given this, I tend to side with Hamilton’s accounts of the authorship issue rather than with Madison’s.

265–267 A recent project by Terry Pettijohn and Donald Sacco (2009) analyzed the lyrics of number one Billboard songs between 1955 and 2003. They discovered that during economic downturns, people preferred lyrics that were more complex, social, and future oriented.

268 There are several ways to determine if collaborations result in average or synergistic language use. Consider how John Lennon and Paul McCartney used present-tense verbs in their lyrics. For their individually written songs, Lennon consistently used more than McCartney (15.8 percent versus 13.7 percent). According to the average-person hypothesis, their collaboration should have resulted in songs that ranged between 13.7 and 15.8 percent present-tense verbs. In fact, the Lennon-McCartney eyeball-to-eyeball collaborations resulted in songs with 17.6 percent present-tense verbs. In this case, Lennon was somewhere between McCartney and Lennon-McCartney—the average writer. We can calculate the percentage of time that Lennon, McCartney, and Lennon-McCartney produced songs that were in the middle of the other two linguistically. The author who was statistically the average person for the Beatles was: 50.6 percent for Lennon, 36.1 percent for McCartney, and 13.3 percent for Lennon-McCartney. The statistically average author for the Federalist Papers was: 39.5 percent for Hamilton, 53.9 percent for Madison, and 6.6 percent for Hamilton-Madison. In other words, when collaborating Lennon-McCartney and Hamilton-Madison were far more extreme than either author on his own.

270 N-gram analyses have been used to characterize authors. For example, Art Graesser and his colleagues have also developed speech-act