“Raked from the Rubbish”: Stylometric Authorship Attribution and the 1795 American Philosophical Society Education Contest
Eric Strome · Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2013
This study attributes two pseudonymous entries to the American Philosophical Society’s 1795 education essay contest by employing conventional historical methods for the first, and a progression of stylometric measures and statistical techniques for the second. New knowledge of who participated in the educational conversation of the early republic is worthwhile in its own right, but it is also offered with a view toward understanding how stylometric analysis and corpus linguistics can contribute to historical argumentation and debate. It reports its methods and conclusions with a transparency characteristic of only the most recent stylometric studies, with the threefold hope that (1) standardization and even replicability will characterize future efforts; (2) nonspecialists will be emboldened to undertake similar work; and (3) recommendations for best practices will prove useful. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.