Author attribution, as a sub-field of stylometry, is well suited to a relatively small set of circumstances: an unsigned letter sent by one of a handful of correspondents, an act of a play written by one of the supposed author’s colleagues, a novel in a series penned by a ghostwriter. The cases where author attribution shines are ones in which there exists (1) a finite list of potential authors (2) for whom we have writing samples in the same genre, and (3) the unknown text is itself long enough to have a clear style. If either of the latter conditions is unmet, the findings start getting fuzzy but are still salvageable. Failing the first condition, all bets are off.

And “Iterating Grace,” fails all three.

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Setting out on a new blog is an exciting thing. In its infancy, it is polymorphous, changing form at will without the inhibition of an established identity. As of this writing, my immediate goal for the blog is to share code and interesting findings from projects as they come up.  (In fact, this post should be followed in the next day or so by one describing an author attribution problem I’ve been working on recently.) At some point, however, I’m sure I will feel compelled to weigh in on problems raised elsewhere in the DH interwebs, and then this blog may move into a more dialogical mode.

Maybe I will stick to the technical, computational side of things, or maybe I will dive headlong into humanistic questions or the academic institutional problems that congeal in DH. I have plans for the shape I would like this to take, but those will almost certainly change as I engage with new problems and need new things from the platform. At about a year into DH scholarship, the research I plan to share here has only just recently emerged from its own mirror stage. I hope that you will get as much out of reading this blog as I get from writing it!

-tr