How does such analysis work? Timothy Highley, professor in the department of computer information science at La Salle University, says a computer could count word and phrase frequency, sentence and scene length, number of clauses, parts of speech, and so on. You'd want "to compare it to a body of contemporary works to determine which characteristics most clearly identify one of Shakespeare's works." Databases now exist that do just that. You can't get 100 percent certainty; nothing can. But you can cut pretty deep.