English Bards and Unknown Reviewers: a Stylometric Analysis of Thomas Moore and the Christabel Review

Fraught relations between authors and critics are a commonplace of literary history. The particular case that we discuss in this article, a negative review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel (1816), has an additional point of interest beyond the usual mixture of amusement and resentment that surrounds a critical rebuke: the authorship of the review remains, to this day, uncertain. The purpose of this article is to investigate the possible candidacy of Thomas Moore as the author of the provocative review. It seeks to solve a puzzle of almost two hundred years, and in the process clear a valuable scholarly path in Irish Studies, Romanticism, and in our understanding of Moore's role in a prominent literary controversy of the age

Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile. Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017

Elena Ferrante is an internationally acclaimed Italian novelist whose real identity has been kept secret by E/O publishing house for more than 25 years. Owing to her popularity, major Italian and foreign newspapers have long tried to discover her real identity. However, only a few attempts have been made to foster a scientific debate on her work. In 2016, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo led an Italian research team that conducted a preliminary study and collected a well-founded, large corpus of Italian novels comprising 150 works published in the last 30 years by 40 different authors. Moreover, they shared their data with a select group of international experts on authorship attribution, profiling, and analysis of textual data: Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki (Poland), Patrick Juola (United States), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (Italy), George Mikros (Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (France), and Jacques Savoy (Switzerland). The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante\u2019s work definitely deserves \u201cmany hands\u201d as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success

Fernando de Herrera y la autoría de Versos: un primer acercamiento al drama textual desde la Estilometría

Además de tratarse de uno de los problemas textuales y de autoría más fascinantes de la poesía del Siglo de Oro, la cuestión en torno a la autenticidad de parte de la obra lírica de Fernando de Herrera ha dividido a la crítica en dos grandes grupos, dando lugar a un impasse que continúa hasta hoy. En este artículo se pretende arrojar nueva luz aplicando metodologías provenientes de las Humanidades Digitales y la Estilometría, empleando una técnica desarrollada recientemente por Maciej Eder, Rolling Stylometry, para detectar si hay varias manos en las obras poéticas dubitadas de Herrera, además de confirmar o rechazar la existencia de la mano de Francisco de Pacheco, principal argumento de los estudiosos que niegan la autoría herreriana.Es handelt sich nicht nur um eines der faszinierendsten philologischen Probleme der Lyrik des Siglo de Oro, sondern die Frage nach der Autorschaft und Authentizität des poetischen Werks von Fernando de Herrera trennt die Fachwelt in zwei Gruppen, die bis heute unversöhnlich erscheinen. Durch die Anwendung neuer Methoden aus dem Bereich der Digital Humanities, hier der Stilometrie und genauer der Rolling Stylometry (jüngst von Maciej Eder entwickelt) soll die Frage unter neuem Licht betrachtet werden. Dazu wird die These untersucht, ob verschiedene poetische Werke von Herrera möglichweise von unterschiedlichen, mehreren Personen verfasst wurden. Der in der bisherhigen Forschung als wahrscheinlichste Kandidat für ein solches „Ghostwriting“ ist der Maler und Herausgeber Francisco de Pacheco

Challenging stylometry: The authorship of the baroque play La Segunda Celestina

The aim of this study was to verify the possibility of Sor Juana Ine´ s de la Cruz authoring the anonymous part of the baroque play La Segunda Celestina, commissioned to Agustın de Salazar, and left unfinished after his death. This is a first systematic stylometric study on this problem and a baroque hispanoamerican text. In our study, we faced building a balanced corpus from few available resources, and took extensive evaluation measures to deal with unclear stylometric signals. We use a variety of established attribution and verification methods, and introduce a novel evaluation procedure of examining historic texts with scarce corpora. The results support Sor Juana’s authorship, and unravel new connections between her and other authors of the time, showing, still undermined, powerful impact of her works on the epoch. The solutions adopted in solving methodological problems of such a complex task show how stylometry can overcome similar challenges

Versification and Authorship Attribution

The technique known as contemporary stylometry uses different methods, including machine learning, to discover a poem’s author based on features like the frequencies of words and character n-grams. However, there is one potential textual fingerprint stylometry tends to ignore: versification, or the very making of language into verse. Using poetic texts in three different languages (Czech, German, and Spanish), Petr Plecháč asks whether versification features like rhythm patterns and types of rhyme can help determine authorship. He then tests its findings on two unsolved literary mysteries. In the first, Plecháč distinguishes the parts of the Elizabethan verse play The Two Noble Kinsmen written by William Shakespeare from those written by his coauthor, John Fletcher. In the second, he seeks to solve a case of suspected forgery: how authentic was a group of poems first published as the work of the nineteenth-century Russian author Gavriil Stepanovich Batenkov? This book of poetic investigation should appeal to literary sleuths the world over.illustrato

Who Authored on Liberty ? Stylometric Evidence on Harriet Taylor Mill’s Contribution

It is well known that John Stuart Mill (JSM) repeatedly acknowledges Harriet Taylor Mill\u27s (HTM) substantial contribution to On Liberty. After her death, however, he decides to publish the book under his name only. Are we justified in continuing this practice, initiated by JSM, of refusing unequivocal co-authorship status to HTM? Drawing on stylometric analyses, we make a preliminary case that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM had a hand in formulating it. Drawing on plausible standards for authorship ascription, we further point out that authorship status requires, in addition to a substantial contribution, the approval by all contributors. We discuss potential reasons to assume that HTM did not approve the published version of On Liberty and would have objected to including her name on the title page

A Computational Investigation into the Authorship of Sister Peg

Peer reviewe

Larger than Life? A Stylometric Analysis of the Multi-Authored 'Vita' of Hildegard of Bingen

This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hildegardis, Hildegard of Bingen's (auto-?)biography. Both Hildegard and her biographers gradually contributed to the text in the course of the last years of Hildegard's life, and it was posthumously completed in the mid-1180s by end redactor Theoderic of Echternach. In between these termini a quo and ante quem the work was allegedly taken up but left unfinished by secretaries Godfrey of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. In light of the fact that the Vita is an indispensable source in gaining historical knowledge on Hildegard's life, the question has often been raised whether the Life of Hildegard is – by dint of contributions by multiple stakeholders – a larger-than-life depiction of the visionary's life course. Specifically the 'autobiographical' passages included in the Vita, in which Hildegard is allegedly cited directly and is taken to recount biographical information in the first-person singular, have been approached with suspicion. By applying state-of-the-art computional methods for the automatic detection of writing style (stylometry), the delicate questions of authenticity and collaborative authorship of this (auto?)hagiographical text are addressed