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arXiv · 2206.05016

Frictional Authors

Devlin Gualtieri
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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.

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Devlin Gualtieri. 2022-05-09. Frictional Authors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.05016

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