This was great fun, thanks for posting it, Wolfy!
I was so perplexed by my results to begin with that to make sure that it wasn't just generating random author names and had hit me with a few weird ones, I posted a VAST amount of material into the analyser. It got quite addictive after a while, and I had plenty of stuff in my documents folder to copy-paste
I found that the results were remarkably consistent, depending on the type of material I was posting.
1) Creative prose. I posted 50 pages or more, in long and short extracts, from a novel I'm working on to one page whimsical pieces, from autobiographical snippets to letters written to the powers that be (this
is a creative endeavour, as I intend to be as imaginatively rude as possible to the beggars if it gets to the stage of having to write to them
). These were written in what I thought was quite a variety of styles and moods. Almost everything, however, came out as H. P. Lovecraft. Cthullu beckons! I come! :horor:
2) Poems. I posted quite a number and got a variety of results. This was the only category for which there was a really broad spread of results. The commonest one overall, however, was James Joyce, followed by Nabokov, Lovecraft (again!) and Mary Shelley (sadly her husband seems not to have been an option!). There were a lot of very odd writers cropping up in this category though, often as one-offs, and they were mostly either older prose writers (ie 19th century or earlier) or modern science fiction writers, very rarely recognised poets. It could be that this just represents the selection of writers on there, or that poems are often shorter and confuse the system, however.
3) More casual personal stuff, like Emails, Pm's, etc. The majority were David Foster Wallace (he's come up a few times already, I assume he used a more colloquial style). Nearly all the ones that weren't were H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, in that order.
4) Forum posts. I tried quite a number of my more serious and lengthy posts on this forum. The majority were Edgar Allan Poe, and most of the rest were Lovecraft (again), with a couple that were David Foster Wallace or Dickens.
As a general principle for all forms of prose, the chances of it being Lovecraft increased in proportion to the length of the piece, except perhaps the longer forum posts, where it was equally likely to be Poe.
Some amusing aberrant results:
A piece intentionally written in the style of the King James I Bible - William Shakespeare.
Several parody poems about
vampires came out as Bram Stoker.
A song I tried to write in something aproximating to Deep South dialect (I wrote it rather quickly and never got round to checking whether I'd got it right) - Mark Twain.
*What the hell, did it sound like something Huckleberry Finn would have said?*
A short, astronomically inspired poem - Arthur Clarke
Edit: Looks like for some strange reason, this post was Lovecraft yet again. I just couldn't resist. AAAAARGH, the horror! I must stop!
