On Determining a Valid Text for Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies: Editing, Unediting, and De-Editing

On Determining a Valid Text for Non-Traditional
Authorship Attribution Studies: Editing, Unediting, and De-Editing

Joseph
Rudman

Carnegie Mellon
jr20@andrew.cmu.edu

2003

University of Georgia

Athens, Georgia

ACH/ALLC 2003

editor

Eric
Rochester

William
A.
Kretzschmar, Jr.

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

INTRODUCTION:

The work’s material history since its
inception, the vast and largely uncharted alterations imposed by
the history and by the mediation of generation upon generation
of printers, editors, publishers—this is a relativism we are
prone to ignore, but ignore at our peril.

(Marcus 1996)

The literary texts often are not homogenous
since they may comprise dialogues, narrative parts, etc. An
integrated approach, therefore, would require the development of
text sampling tools for selecting the parts of the text that
best illustrate an author’s style.

(Stamatatos et al. 2001)

Most non-traditional authorship attribution studies place too much emphasis
on statistics, stylistics, and the computer and not enough focus is given to
the integrity and validity of the primary data— the text itself.
It is intuitively obvious and easily shown empirically that if you are
conducting a study of the patterns of an author’s stylistic usage (e.g.
Daniel Defoe), the study will be systematically denigrated by each
interpolation of non-Defoe text and even by each interpolation of Defoe text
of a different genre or significantly different time period.
The crux of this paper is about one important element in the empirical
methodology of a valid non-traditional authorship attribution study—the
preparation of the text for stylistic and statistical analysis: unediting,
de-editing, and editing.
The general emphasis of this presentation is on prose analysis with some
peripheral treatment of drama and poetry.

I. BACKGROUND AND DEFINITIONS
A. Why a valid text is necessary should not even be asked. No
valid experiment can be done if the input data is flawed—garbage
in, garbage out!Too many practitioners simply grab a text
from any available source—without any thought to its pedigree.
(e.g. Khmelev and Tweedie’s “Using Markov Chains for the
Identification of Writers.”)Are undertakings such as
Project Gutenberg or the Oxford Text Archive with their easily
available machine readable texts a boon or a bane to
non-traditional authorship atudies? This question is explored in
some detail.
B. Selecting a starting textThe validity of using texts
from the oral tradition and the scribal tradition is
discussed.Before any manipulation and analysis of a text is
carried out, a valid starting text must be acquired that
fulfills many necessary requirements. This selection is
primarily bibliographically driven. If a practitioner is not
savvy in the bibliographical arts, a collaborator who is should
be recruited.Examples of bad starting texts causing
problems are given (e.g. Peng and Hengartner’s “Quantitative
Analysis of Literary Styles.”)If you cannot obtain a valid
text, do not do the study.
C. Unediting—getting back to the
state of “not yet edited”De-editing—removing selected text
Editing—changing (preparing) a text for
statistical analysis

II. EXPLICATIONThe statement, “each age, each author, each study
demands a different mixture of the following particulars,” is discussed.
A. UneditingAs a rule, the closest text to the holograph
should be found and used.
1. Editorial interpolation
a. Filled in lacunae
b. Marginal notation
c. ‘Changes’ in the text
d. Critical editions

2. Printer interpolation
For the Printer is a beast, and
understands nothing I can say to him of correcting
the press.
Dryden (Ward p. 97)
a. Catchwords (the first word of the next leaf
or gathering)
b. Signatures (combinations of letters and
numerals used something like catchwords)
c. Removing obvious typesetting mistakes (a
slippery slope)
i. ‘f’ for the long ‘s’
ii. Double words (e.g. ‘the the’ ‘was
was’

B. De-editing
1. Quotes
a. Factual, unattributed
b. Factual, attributed
c. Self quotes from earlier writings

2. Plagiarism
a. Direct copy
b. Paraphrasing
c. Imitation

3. Collaboration
a. Sectional
b. Phrasal
c. Word level
d. Ghostwriting

4. Genre
a. Poetry, prose, drama, letters, etc.
b. Mixture (e.g. verse drama)

5. Graphs and Numbers
a. Tables
b. Lists
c. Arabic and Roman numerals

6. Guide words
a. Titles—chapter headings—the end word
‘Finis’
b. Marginal annotation

7. Foreign Languages
a. Sentence level and greater
b. Phrase or word level

8. Translations
a. Verbatim
b. Concepts

9. Examples of items de-edited (or not de-edited)
incorrectly by practitioners
a. Biblical quotes
b. Titles in direct apposition
c. Numbers that are spelled out
d. Words with an initial capital

C. Editing
1. Encoding the text
a. Why (e.g. homographic forms)
b. TEI

2. Regularizing
a. Spelling
b. Contracted forms (simple, compound)
c. Hyphenation
d. Masked words (e.g. ‘D_ _ _ e’ for ‘Defoe’)

3. Lemmatizing
a. Pro
b. Con

D. Special Problems in Drama and Poetry
1. Stage directions
2. The ‘age’ dependency of transmission and technique.

III. SOME EXAMPLESStudies that are compromised by mistakes of
commission and/or omission in editing, unediting, or de-editing.
A. Historia Augusta
1. Twelve individual studies

B. Shakespeare
1. Eliott and Valenza
2. Foster
3. Horton

C. Defoe
1. Hargevik
2. Rothman

IV. CONCLUSION
1. Some items that are de-edited are valid style markers in
their own right (e.g. latin phrases, different genre) and should
be treated as such in a parallel study.
2. No matter which text is selected, the practitioner must
disclose which text was used and everything that was done to
it.
3. The same care must be taken with every text in the
study—the anonymous text, the suspected author’s text, and all
of the control texts.
4. If valid texts cannot be located and correctly edited,
unedited, and de-edited, do not do the study
5. A valid text does not guarantee a valid study. However, a
non-valid text guarantees a non-valid study.

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