Una versione iterativa della distanza intertestuale applicata a un corpus di opere della letteratura italiana contemporanea

The main aim of this study is testing the performance of Labbe's intertextual distance in the case of a corpus of novels of the Italian literature; moreover an iterative revised version of intertextual distance is introduced. The revised procedure is based on repeated measures of the intertextual distance between pairs of text-chunks of equal size. It is intended to counterbalance the size factor and assess the similarity of texts of very different sizes. In order to test if and to what extent intertextual distance is suitable to assess authorship attribution in the case of Italian novels, we took into account the rankings obtained with reference to each novel ordering the others by means of the values of intertextual distances. Opportunities and limits of the available procedures are discussed.