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

Joseph Rudman Carnegie Mellon jr20@andrew.cmu.edu

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 text
  The 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. EXPLICATION
The statement, “each age, each author, each study demands a different mixture of the following particulars,” is discussed.
- A. Unediting
  As 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 EXAMPLES
Studies 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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