E-mail writers and texters are always looking for ways to have fun with (not to mention make more interesting) their often humdrum e-mails and texts. But they only have one style of writing—their own. Until now. Now they can write in the style of the great writers of the past.
Also, fiction writers trying to recreate the style of a historical period need an easy, fast way to avoid anachronisms.
Also, scholars studying old texts use such apps to better understand texts written in the past in context, and to avoid anachronistic errors.
Benjamin Schmidt, for instance, has created a program for assessing the amount of anachronism in TV scripts.
http://www.prochronism.com/
http://bmschmidt.wordpress.com/
THE DESIGN:
Use Schmidt’s and other “linguistic inquiry” or “word-count” type programs as a template to create an app where a user could:
1. Translate a modern text into a text written in the style and vocabulary of a particular historical period—say a present-day love-text translated into Shakespearean English,
2. Identify the historical period of an old text,
3. Identify anachronisms in historical fiction text,
4. Run a word-fingerprint to help identify anonymous communications,
5. Identify the emotional content of texts,
6. Perform in fact any kind of Word-Count-oriented linguistic inquiry one might require.
Ted Silar 