The Delta Spreadsheets

Copyright © 2005, 2007, 2008 by David L. Hoover

These spreadsheets with macros accept as input raw word frequency lists and analyze authorship using John Burrows's Delta and my various Delta Primes. There is an abstract of my ALLC/ACH poster presentation in Victoria, June 18, 2005 that will explain the spreadsheets more fully. My DH2007 poster gives more detail on the new versions, which are more compact because of a new formula for Delta by Shlomo Argamon (2008); also see my abstract, "Updating Delta and Delta Prime." The 2008 versions have been largely rewritten and are MUCH faster. They also now include a macro to import the word lists automatically. Note that only DeltaCalc2008 contains the newest annotations to the macros. To learn how to use these sheets, download "Using the Delta Calculation Worksheets.pdf", below.

The spreadsheets and macros presented here may be used and distributed freely by anyone, so long as their use is acknowledged in any published work. I would also appreciate hearing about any modifications or improvements you may make.

Use them at your own risk. I have not discovered any problems in using them, but cannot guarantee they will not cause any.

For a discussion of Delta and it's use, see the following articles:

Burrows, J. F. (2002a). “‘Delta’: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 17: 267-287.
Burrows, John F. (2002b). “The Englishing of Juvenal: computational stylistics and translated texts.” Style 36: 677-99.
Burrows, J. F. (2003). “Questions of authorship: attribution and beyond.” Computers and the Humanities 37: 5-32.
Hoover, David L. Testing Burrows's Delta, Literary and Linguistic Computing 2004 19: 453-475
Hoover, David L. Delta Prime? Literary and Linguistic Computing 2004 19: 477-495
Hoover, D. L. (2007). “Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry, and the Styles of Henry James,” Style 41(2) 2007: 174-203.
Hoover, D. L. (2007). “Quantitative Analysis and Literary Studies,” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007: 517-33.
Hoover, D. L. (2007). “Word Frequency, Statistical Stylistics, and Authorship Attribution,” in Dawn Archer (ed.), What's in a Word-list? Investigating Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction. Aldershot, U.K: Ashgate, 2008, in press.
van Dalen-Oskam, Karina, and Joris van Zundert. (2007). “Delta for Middle Dutch—Author and Copyist Distinction in Walewein.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 2007 22(3): 345-362.
Argamon, Shlomo. (2008). “Interpreting Burrows’s Delta: Geometric and Probabilistic Foundations.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 2008 23(2): 131-147.

Current Versions (2008):

DeltaCalc2008.xls Standard version of Delta analysis, but with Argamon's formula.

DeltaCalcLz2008.xls Delta-Lz (see my "Delta Prime?" for explanation), but with Argamon's formula.

DeltaCalcOz2008.xls Delta-Oz (see my "Delta Prime?" for explanation), but with Argamon's formula.

Note: the distribution versions contain some data from previous analyses. This is intentional, allowing anyone wanting to try them to run an analysis already prepared.

Macro Descriptions and Instructions:

Using the Delta Calculation Worksheets