John Burrows Founds Computational Sylistics

In 1987 John Burrows of the University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia, published Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels and an Experiment in Method. This work, which showed that a quantitative study of function word use can reveal subtle and powerful patterns in language, founded computational stylistics, and pioneered the application of principal component analysis (PCA) to language data.