An Inquiry into Authorial Attribution

Authors

Sarah Potvin, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

Summer 2009

Citation

Report to the CDRH, white paper, issued Summer 2009.

Comments

Copyright (c) 2009 Sarah Potvin.

Abstract

At attempt to establish the authorship of several unsigned pieces that appeared in the Pittsburgh magazine Home Monthly circa 1896-­‐1897 using computational attribution techniques did not deliver robust results. The report that follows examines the computational methods advocated by professors David Hoover, Patrick Juola, and Matthew Jockers. It emphasizes the importance of contextualizing any statistical attribution results with traditional scholarship, as demonstrated by both Hoover and Jockers, and calls for collaboration between humanists and statisticians in interpreting and integrating statistical data.