Abstract Stylometry—the science of measuring writing styles—typically relies on the counting of word or letter frequencies to offer judgements on the authorship of anonymous texts. However, a number of 20th-century tables remain prominently in use by authorship scholars. Most significant among these are Philip Timberlake’s 1931 The Feminine Ending in English Blank Verse, and Ants Oras’s 1960 Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Timberlake’s study counted how frequently early modern verse lines ended on an additional, unstressed syllable, while Oras’s study counted the pause positions in lines of verse. The works of Timberlake and Oras occupy a contentious place in the study of authorship, in which they are occasionally framed as a safer alternative to modern methods. Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett, for example, cited Timberlake’s study as one that could help them avoid the ‘controversy about the relative value and reliability of different ‘non-traditional’ methods’ in authorship studies (Proudfoot and Bennett). This article examines the evidentiary value of Oras and Timberlake’s data when applied to machine-learning stylometry tests. Results from this research suggest that Oras and Timberlake’s data lead to an extremely marginal increase in accuracy for stylometry experiments, and do not justify their use over modern approaches, such as the counts of the most frequently occurring words.
Nathan Dooner (Thu,) studied this question.