Thorsten Ries

Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviour, Products and Institutions. Willard McCarty (ed).

After ‘decades of hype’ and dizzying ‘constant demands for innovation’ (p. 1) in the digital humanities, this volume endeavours to bring the discussion back to issues at the centre of textual scholarship and computing. It is composed of a number of papers that have been delivered at the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship from autumn 2006 to spring 2008, and is completed with two invited contributions. In his introductory outline, Willard McCarty sketches the volumes central interest in a computational ‘scholarly intelligence’ (p. 2) where humanities and computer science change and augment each other leveraging the calculatory efficiency and dynamic reconfigurability of computing machines. The first part of the book is endowed to models for computed analysis of textual features. While Ian Lancashire and Peter Garrard employ feature models geared towards cybernetics, cognitivism, and medical pathology, John Burrows’ probabilistic differential Delta z method for authorship attribution is based on statistical analysis of word distribution patterns only. In his contribution, Burrows presents results of three case studies in which Delta z identified the frequency patterns of multiple authors for predefined text segments. By this measure, for example, Delta z succeeded to determine at which point Arthur Quiller-Couch took over completing Robert Louis Stevensons St. Ives and which parts of D.H. Lawrences and Molly Skinners The Boy in the Bush are additions or rewrites by the more renowned novelist. The effectiveness of Delta, possible improvements, and language dependency are currently subject to lively discussion (Hoover, 2004; Stein and Argamon, 2006; Rybicki and Eder, 2011). Burrows argues for the strengths of the stochastic approach of Delta, suggesting to implement semantically or morphologically enriched designs as independent tests. Thinking about the general role of statistics in the humanities, Burrows rejects strict scientific falsificationism and argues—one might be reminded …