Frictional Authors
Computation and Language
2022-06-13 v1
Abstract
I present a method for text analysis based on an analogy with the dynamic friction of sliding surfaces. One surface is an array of points with a 'friction coefficient' derived from the distribution frequency of a text's alphabetic characters. The other surface is a test patch having points with this friction coefficient equal to a median value. Examples are presented from an analysis of a broad range of public domain texts, and comparison is made to the Flesch Reading Ease. Source code for the analysis program is provided.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2206.05016,
title = {Frictional Authors},
author = {Devlin Gualtieri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.05016},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
16 page PDF file with 6 figures and two tables. Source code for analysis is included