Literature analysis site Prosecraft shut down on Monday after many authors expressed concern online that their books were included without their consent. Prosecraft was a product of Shaxpir, a cloud-based word processing software. According to a blog post, Prosecraft launched in 2017 after founder Benji Smith estimated the word count of his favorite books while writing his memoir. Prosecraft automated that process, analyzing text for word count and number of adverbs, as well as “vividness” and “passive voice,” and sharing sample pages of the latter. The venture used “techniques [that] were originally developed by computational linguists at the UVM Computational […]
