Literary Detective Work on the Computer

“Interesting, packed and wide-ranging.”

“This book will prove a valuable resource for anyone wishing to gain a working knowledge of the methods and achievements of computational stylometry. It covers a wide range of studies in the field, explaining the main results and the techniques used to find them in an accessible manner. A strong point is that it includes a number of worked examples showing, with the aid of small-scale data sets, how some of the more important quantitative methods can be implemented. A further strength is its use of the public-domain system R to illustrate how certain important ideas could be put into practice.
Both newcomers and experienced bardographers will find much of interest in Chapter 3, which gives a dispassionate, empirically grounded overview of a number of key studies of the authorship of the Shakespearean canon. It also includes a clear step-by-step exposition of how Bayes's Rule may be used in investigations of this kind. Chapter 5, on decipherment, contains fascinating accounts of the attempts to decipher the Rongorongo glyphs of Rapanui (Easter Island) and the ancient seals of the lost Indus Valley civilization, among others -- introducing the basic notions of Information Theory and Markov modelling as it does so.”

“In my view this is an excellent and much-missed overview of, and introduction to, the use of statistical tests, methods and approaches to language decipherment and recognition. The in-depth discussions of the methods employed in the so-far unsuccessful decipherment of Rongorongo and the Indus Valley texts is an especially engaging read.”

“The chapter, illustrated with several examples of problems in New Testament Studies, will provide a good introduction and overview of the subject area, targeted at computer scientists who are specialists neither in statistics nor in biblical studies. The emphasis on the methods of multivariate statistical analysis, such as correspondence analysis, is a welcome feature.”

“Very comprehensive and easy to read.”

“This book is a valuable repository of techniques, methods, tasks, cases, and background relevant to
computational stylometry. I admire the way in which Oakes’ interpretation of his own research and that of others supports deeper understanding of the tasks tackled.”