Google has failed me here, so I’m turning to Cecil’s Teeming Millions to see if they have any advice.
A. Frederick Collins and Francis A. Collins both wrote about U.S. radio (aka “wireless”) in the first couple decades of the 20th century. A. Frederick Collins was well known to be a “real” person, and a source claims that “Francis A. Collins” was merely a pen name he sometimes used.
Is there an online official list of registered pen names anywhere? Or, since there are extensive texts available for both authors, are there any sites were you can compare the writings to see if they appear to come from the same author?
Pen names don’t need to be registered; all you need to do it start using one.
There is computer analysis of texts that can indicate authorship, but I’m not sure if they are available online.
For example, people took known texts from various authors in Shakespeare’s time and compared it to the plays to see if there were similarities. The two main findings were that the works known as Shakespeare’s have a strong consistency, as though they were written by a single author, and that the various candidates for writing Shakespeare under a pen name did not have a very high degree of similarity to the Shakespeare plays.
I’m told that I have a very specific way of abusing adverbs and dangling modifiers; it shows a distinctive “voice” in my writing.
When one of my ESL students–one who uses articles the way Joey Tribbiani uses air quotes–turns in an essay with flawless grammar, I may suspect a bit of the old cut-and-paste. I take one unique-looking sentence, type it into Google, and I generally find my source.
“Wireless Communication in the United States” is a meticulously prepared volume written by Thorn L. Mayes and published by The New England Wireless and Steam Museum. The book’s cover features an iconic drawing, “The ‘S-O-S’”, from chapter 5 of “The Wireless Man” by Francis A. Collins, published in 1912. The acknowledgments section of Mayes’ book, reviewing the front cover illustration, states that “Francis A. Collins is one of the ways that A. Frederick Collins arranged his name.”
In 1912, A. Frederick Collins was being tried for stock fraud, and he would be found guilty in January, 1913.
Nov 1, 1957 obituary for Francis A. Collins in the NYTimes. Says he was 84. Lists his books including The Wireless Man. Born in Newark, attended U. Penn. Worked as a youth for Scientific American in NYC. Wrote for the NY Sun in 1899-1900. 1901-1908 was asst. Sunday editor of the old NY Herald.
I’ll try to find some info on A. Frederick tonight. Gotta dash to work now.
I think such a program would fail due to authors works often adjusted by editors. You might be able to pick out works edited by a similar person or pick out what style guide was used but in a world where publishers often make adjustments to works picking out the author might be more difficult then you’d think.
After putting the name in the box, with surname first, select the “Name Authority Headings”. Eventually, after selecting “Authorized heading” and clicking on the heading, you can get coded records for the two people, which include these fields:
The format used is the MARC Authorities format, and in it:
100 denotes the authorised heading;
400 denotes a see reference from an alternative form of heading;
670 denotes a piece of information found while researching the heading.
The records do make it clear that two different people are involved here.
I’m not so sure about that. Most editors send back comments to let the author rewrite or correct problems. And if an editor is going to rewrite a section themselves, they want to imitate the author’s style as much as possible. You don’t want a reader stumbling across a paragraph and thinking “Gee, this must have been edited in.”
In my experience, there are two types of editors in the world: those who don’t change anything and those who want to change everything. (I’ve heard there are some in the middle but they remain mythical.)
Editors who want to change everything - and have the power to do so - change everything. There’s nothing left of an author’s style except where it agreed with the editor’s style.
whitetho, what in the world did you mean by that? Una does all of Ed’s research these days.
