How Forensic Linguistics Outed J.K. Rowling (Not to Mention James Madison, Barack Obama, and the Rest of Us)

Virginia Hughes in her National Geographic blog, Only Human:

Earlier this week, the UK’s Sunday Times rocked the publishing world byrevealing that Robert Galbraith, the first-time author of a new crime novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling, is none other than J.K. Rowling, the superstar author of the Harry Potter series. Then the New York Times told the story of how the Sunday Times’s arts editor, Richard Brooks, had figured it out.

One of Brooks’s colleagues got an anonymous tip on Twitter claiming that Galbraith was Rowling. The tipster’s Twitter account was then swiftly deleted. Before confronting the publisher with the question, Brooks’s team did some web sleuthing. They found that the two authors shared the same publisher and agent. And, after consulting with two computer scientists, they discovered that The Cuckoo’s Calling and Rowling’s other books show striking linguistic similarities. Satisfied that the Twitter tipster was right, Brooks reached out to Rowling. Finally, on Saturday morning, as the New York Times reports, “he received a response from a Rowling spokeswoman, who said that she had ‘decided to fess up’.”

While the literary world was buzzing about whether that anonymous tipster was actually Rowling’s publisher, Little, Brown and Company (it wasn’t), I wanted to know how those computer scientists did their mysterious linguistic analyses. I called both of them yesterday and learned not only how the Rowling investigation worked, but about the fascinating world of forensic linguistics.

More here.