Ragtime is considered a ‘hybrid from folk and written cultures’ and poses serious challenges regarding its very identity. Musicologists have identified important rhythmic and harmonic patterns through musical analyses that they consider as characteristic patterns of the genre. In this paper we employ computational methods to investigate the RAG-corpus of 11000 ragtime MIDI files on the occurrence of characteristic patterns and their role regarding the identity of the genre. We show how the computational processing of a large musical corpus can complement and augment traditional musicological analyses of ragtimes.