Help me find an expert in stylometry and forensic linguistics

May 13, 2015 9:30 AM

I'm working on a project that focuses on determining authorship of a well-known work in pop culture. I have anecdotal evidence of authorship, but need to back it up with science. It's along the lines of the work done to discover that J.K. Rowling was the author of The Cuckoo's Calling, writing under the pen name Robert Galbraith.

I approached the guy who did that analysis and he's intrigued but not interested in doing the work himself; I think one foray into pop culture was enough for him.

There are various college programs and experts, but most seem to focus on the legal arena. I think I'd be better served with someone in academia who's focused more on things like figuring out who really wrote questionable 16th century plays, or maybe someone doing graduate work in the area? Even better, someone who's cool with dabbling in something rather less serious that Shakespeare.

Or maybe there's software that will let me do this myself?

A previous Ask focused on a similar topic, but it's a decade old now.

I have to be vague about the work itself for the moment.

posted by bassomatic to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Donald Wayne Foster is well known in this field and has worked in pop culture. For example, he helped identify Joe Klein as the author of the political novel Primary Colors.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:02 AM on May 13, 2015

Came in to recommend Donald Foster. It sounds right up his alley.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:16 AM on May 13, 2015

If you're looking for a more computational approach, you could ask Ward Elliott if he knows of a former Shakespeare Clinic student who continues to do stylometry or text analysis. DIY, either JGAAP or JStylo look pretty good. Patrick Juola of Juola & Associates is one of the developers of JGAAP.

Why does the "focus on the legal arena" put you off? Resolving copyright disputes about pop-culture media seems like it would be a big part of determining authorship for court cases.
posted by katya.lysander at 2:56 PM on May 13, 2015

Oh, and Mr. Bad Example asked this question a while ago (on a related subject), but based on his comment history, he's still around...
posted by katya.lysander at 2:59 PM on May 13, 2015

Best answer: I know someone. I'll send you a memail with his details. If he isn't interested, he probably has a student who is.
posted by lollusc at 5:34 PM on May 13, 2015

Foster was exposed pretty badly years ago and no longer works in the field. There are plenty of others who do, though, using more robust and less ... fantastic ... methodologies than Foster turned out to be using. Arthur Kinney at UMass used to run a whole lab of PhD students working on attribution studies, working closely with Australian attribution scholar Hugh Craig. Mr Bad Example works in another comparable lab. A good thing to do would be to look through recent issues of Digital Humanities Quarterlyor Literary and Linguistic Computing (as was) to see who the current names in the field are and what they're working on.
posted by Sonny Jim at 2:48 AM on May 15, 2015