I recently finished my master’s thesis, in which I studied the evolution of academic language. TL;DR: In Czech, the proclaimed transition from the Central European style of academic writing to the Anglo-American style did not manifest itself in the stylometric indicators I measured. When I was doing research and reading about different styles of academic writing, I realized that I generally jive more with the Central European style: My writing is digressive, I use long, complicated sentences and paragraphs, it takes me a while to make a point… It also translates directly into how many footnotes I use.
In my master’s thesis I used 57 footnotes over 61 pages of text. Similarly, I used 62 footnotes over 68 pages in my bachelor’s thesis. Interestingly, in both cases the ratio of footnotes to pages is similar, i.e ~0.9. Have I discovered the holy grail of stylometry? Is this the ultimate measure that accurately quantifies and defines an author’s style? Probably not. But it is interesting to see if and how different authors use footnotes.
Too bad footnotes aren’t really a thing in HTML.