Humanities Data Analysis “125 85018 Karsdrop Humanities ch01 3p” — 2020/8/19 — 11 05 — page 280 — #33 280 • Chapter 8 8 5 Conclusions Authorship is an old and important problem in philology but, nowad[.]
“125-85018_Karsdrop_Humanities_ch01_3p” — 2020/8/19 — 11:05 — page 280 — #33 280 • Chapter 8.5 Conclusions Authorship is an old and important problem in philology but, nowadays, stylistic authentication problems are studied in a much more diverse set of fields, including forensic linguistics and internet safety studies Computational modeling brings added value to many societally relevant problems as such and is often less biased than human readers in performing this difficult task Any serious authentication study in the humanities, however, should not rely on hard numbers alone: additional, text-external evidence must always be carefully taken into account and whenever one encounters an attribution result that diametrically opposes results obtained by conventional studies, that should be a cause for worry At the same time, stylometry often brings fresh quantitative evidence to the table that might call into question preconveived ideas about the authorship of texts The case study presented above, for instance, raised interesting questions about a text, of which the authorship for centuries went undisputed At the same, the reader should note that the Hildegard scholars involved in this research (Jeroen Deploige and Sarah Moens) still chose to edit the disputed texts as part of Hildegard’s opera omnia, because the ties to her oeuvre were unmistakable This should remind us that authorship and authenticity are often more a matter of (probabilistic) degree than of a (boolean) kind Exactly because of these scholarly gradients, quantitative approaches are useful to help objectify our own intuitions 8.6 Further Reading The field of stylometry is a popular and rapidly evolving branch of digital text analysis Technical introductions and tutorials nevertheless remain sparse in the field, especially for Python Baayen’s acclaimed book on linguistic analysis in R contains a number of useful sections (Baayen 2008), as does Jockers’s introductory book (Jockers 2014) On the topic of authorship specifically, three relatively technical survey papers are typically listed as foundational readings: Koppel, Schler, and Argamon (2009), Stamatatos (2009), and Juola (2006) A number of recent companions, such as Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth (2004) or Siemens and Schreibman (2008), contain relevant chapters on stylometry and quantitative stylistics Exercises Easy Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), the famous Roman statesman, was also an accomplished writer of Latin prose He is famous for his collection of war commentaries, including the Bellum Civile, offering an account of the civil war, and the Bellum Gallicum, where he reports on his military expeditions in Gaul