3quarksdaily, one of my favourite sites to read just posted a very nice essay by Sanjukta Paul on Where Probability Meets Literature and Language: Markov Models for Text Analysis. The essay starts with Markov, who in the 19th century was doing linguistic analysis by hand and goes to authorship attribution by people like Fiona Tweedie (the image above is from a study she co-authored). It also explains markov models on the way.