Quote:
Originally Posted by Solon
No, you're not giving me a hard time, and thanks for all the details you provide. I have nothing other than passing curiosity, and wondered if anyone was familiar with this type of endeavor and what he/she thought of it. Has stylometry been accepted in other fields, or is this just a statistical game? I'm not looking for hardcore answers, just curious about the size of the iceberg beneath this tip.
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I think Arch has it about right. I have seen it used in various disciplines. For example, you see it pop up in the 70s in Biblical Studies in terms of trying to establish authorship of things like Isaiah. I think the study you link to underscores some of the problems with the measures that are used. Namely, how stable are these measure within author? If within author variation is large, then you can't make meaningful infererences in terms of identifying authors.
I don't know the literature well enough give a sense for the advantages or disadvantage of various measures in general. The article does talk about these issues a little bit. I will say that I don't like the original stuff by BYU that relied on non-contextual word use patterns ("and it came to pass") because it seems likely that non-contextual word use is affected by translator choice or preference.
However, I think stylometrics could be useful but I think one needs to have a pretty sharp hypothesis about how the different proposed authors wrote. I think in such a case the results could be quite compelling.