Can style be measured?

Abstract

Historically, style is studied by features which reflect certain types of characteristics used to illustrate cultural circumstances and social aspects. Thus, style can be identified. If there are some attributes that have magnitude which can serve as common denominators to theoretically represent a style, then a style can be detected as an entity that possesses some basic properties. Furthermore, these attributes can be used as the stages in a scale for measuring how strong a style is, and the degree of similarity between two styles. The fundamental unit of style measurement is a set of common features appearing in objects, which is used for categorising a style. There are two properties of style derived from perceiving the common-feature sets: similarity and degree of style. Therefore, the set of common features is the fundamental unit of measurement and the signature of a style.