On the Development of Digital Signatures for Author Identification

With the increasing numbers of books converted to a digital format, represented generally with underlying ASCII text, it is now feasible to perform frequency analyses on the components of a book. This leads to the question of whether or not frequency analysis can be used as a biometric tool to determine authorship, in other words, to be used as a digital signature for author identification. The results of this study indicate some positive findings, and that there is potential in further study of this type of analysis. The importance of this area of research is intensified because of the current projects to digitize all of the world´s literature.