The paper presents a study that applies information theory to uncover the subtext in Chekhov’s story Ward No. 6. By adding glosses that make the story’s implicit knowledge explicit, several enriched text versions were created, alongside one intentionally misleading version. By the measures Skewness and Kurtosis, meaningful subtextual enrichments could be distinguished from the fake, as the distributions of information density in the meaningful enriched variants differ clearly in shape from those in the fake enrichments.

The paper presents a study that applies information theory to uncover the subtext in Chekhov’s story Ward No. 6. By adding glosses that make the story’s implicit knowledge explicit, several enriched text versions were created, alongside one intentionally misleading version. By the measures Skewness and Kurtosis, meaningful subtextual enrichments could be distinguished from the fake, as the distributions of information density in the meaningful enriched variants differ clearly in shape from those in the fake enrichments.