The author’s fingerprint. A computerised attribution method

Paolo Canettieri

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2014, Supplemento 6, 191-202

Abstract

Methods borrowed from Information Theory are applied to the traditional text criticism. A critique of the raw cladistic methods and an interpretation of the dichotomy-phenomenon are offered. The same methods are applied to 13th century Italian poetry to determine authorship attributions and to verify commonly accepted literary taxonomy. Philology is a human science primarily applied to literary texts and traditionally divided into lower and higher criticism. Lower criticism tries to reconstruct the author’s original text and higher criticism is the study of the authorship, style, and provenance of texts. The use of methods borrowed from information theory makes it possible to bring together methodologically some of the sectors of the two fields. The outcome of the experiments in both text criticism and text attribution has been encouraging. In the former, the tests performed on three different traditions have provided results very similar to those obtained by traditional methods requiring a great amount of time. The experiments carried out both on 13th century Italian poets and schools have shown that it is possible to draw texts closer to one another. Furthermore, the method we have used makes it possible to attribute anonymous writings.

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