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Hmm. Unfortunate title by the NYT. “The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled

Hmm. Unfortunate title by the NYT. “The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.” And the authors didn't use plagiarism software, the article never mentions which exact piece of software they use but it does say, “Scholars have used computer-assisted techniques in the humanities for several decades. Most of that scholarship, however, uses function words such as articles and prepositions to create a “digital signature” that can be used to identify a writer as author or co-author of another work, rather than using comparatively rare words to locate a source. Mr. McCarthy was inspired to use plagiarism software by the work of Sir Brian Vickers, who used similar techniques in 2009 to identify Shakespeare as a co-author of the play “Edward III.” While the book has been received favorably, the statistical techniques used have not yet been subjected to a rigorous review by other scholars in the digital humanities field. The first part is accurate and refers to computational stylometry or lesserly statistical stylometry[0] Software like that gives you a measure for similarity in style. I've been to a couple of academic talks on the topic–what the software does is track stylistically invariant features, this can be function word relative frequency, but it also can track infrequently used words (or phrases). Using this technique (computational method) you can compare texts and see how they cluster. Similar texts will cluster closer together but it does not mean the author's plagiarised each other, just that have similar "styles" for one definition of style. My understanding of plagiarism software is that it looks for similarities in content, not form. source: I'm supposed to be a digital humanist! :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Current_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Current_research related: “The Secret Life of Pronouns: James Pennebaker at TEDxAustin” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGsQwAu3PzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGsQwAu3PzU

pcnix 9y ago
Digital Humanist sounds interesting, what does it imply?
- igravious 9y ago
  Hi there, Glad you asked. Happy to share. A digital humanist[0][1][2] is both (a) someone who applies computational methods and digital technology to research questions in the arts and humanities (so-called humanities computing[3]) and (b) someone who critically thinks about what sort of impact information and communications technologies are having on their discipline, included in this portion would be new media studies. As such digital humanities is a very broad church. It serves as a glue between people in different art/humanities-based fields and disciplines so that even though I might be in Classics and you might be in History we would still be able fruitfully collaborate. Of great concern to the digital humanities are open standards, open data, and open access. We care about metadata, semantic annotation, encodings, certain statistical methods, network analysis, digital archiving, computational linguistics, concept modelling, the semantic web stack, and so on. We also see ourselves as the inheritors of the humanist tradition, from Petrarch on downwards–we are certainly not anti-science and we reject the science/humanities dichotomy. Many of us would advocate for a third culture along the lines of Brockman[4] though this sentiment is more latent than explicit. If you've any questions please do not hesitate to ask! [0] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ [1] http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/ http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities [3] http://www.mccarty.org.uk/essays/McCarty,%20Humanities%20computing.pdf http://www.mccarty.org.uk/essays/McCarty,%20Humanities%20com... [4] https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_brockman-the-third-culture https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_brockman-the-third-cu...
JorgeGT 9y ago
> the authors didn't use plagiarism software, the article never mentions which exact piece of software they use The article (at least now) says "Mr. McCarthy used decidedly modern techniques to marshal his evidence, employing WCopyfind, an open-source plagiarism software". This seems correct, and the software is indeed intended to be used primarily to detect plagiarism: http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/ http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/
- igravious 9y ago
  I could have sworn that paragraph wasn't there when I read the article, I remember reading the paragraph above which reads, "Martin Meisel, professor of dramatic literature emeritus at Columbia University, said in another review that the book is “impressively argued.” He added that there is no question the manuscript “must have been somewhere in the background mix of Shakespeare’s mental landscape” while writing the plays." and the one below which starts, "In the dedication to his manuscript, for example, North urges those who might see themselves as ugly to strive to be inwardly beautiful, to defy nature. He uses a succession of words to make the argument, including “proportion,” “glass,” “feature,” “fair,” “deformed,” “world,” “shadow” and “nature.”" Though I'm far from being an expert in this area this is the first time I've heard of the above mentioned software being mentioned in the digital humanities or humanities computing context. Generally scholars use R or Python to perform computational stylometry. See this representative paper, for instance: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/eder-rybicki-kestemont.pdf https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/eder-rybicki-ke...

pcnix 9y ago

Digital Humanist sounds interesting, what does it imply?

igravious 9y ago
Hi there, Glad you asked. Happy to share. A digital humanist[0][1][2] is both (a) someone who applies computational methods and digital technology to research questions in the arts and humanities (so-called humanities computing[3]) and (b) someone who critically thinks about what sort of impact information and communications technologies are having on their discipline, included in this portion would be new media studies. As such digital humanities is a very broad church. It serves as a glue between people in different art/humanities-based fields and disciplines so that even though I might be in Classics and you might be in History we would still be able fruitfully collaborate. Of great concern to the digital humanities are open standards, open data, and open access. We care about metadata, semantic annotation, encodings, certain statistical methods, network analysis, digital archiving, computational linguistics, concept modelling, the semantic web stack, and so on. We also see ourselves as the inheritors of the humanist tradition, from Petrarch on downwards–we are certainly not anti-science and we reject the science/humanities dichotomy. Many of us would advocate for a third culture along the lines of Brockman[4] though this sentiment is more latent than explicit. If you've any questions please do not hesitate to ask! [0] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ [1] http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/ http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities [3] http://www.mccarty.org.uk/essays/McCarty,%20Humanities%20computing.pdf http://www.mccarty.org.uk/essays/McCarty,%20Humanities%20com... [4] https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_brockman-the-third-culture https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_brockman-the-third-cu...

JorgeGT 9y ago

> the authors didn't use plagiarism software, the article never mentions which exact piece of software they use The article (at least now) says "Mr. McCarthy used decidedly modern techniques to marshal his evidence, employing WCopyfind, an open-source plagiarism software". This seems correct, and the software is indeed intended to be used primarily to detect plagiarism: http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/ http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/

igravious 9y ago
I could have sworn that paragraph wasn't there when I read the article, I remember reading the paragraph above which reads, "Martin Meisel, professor of dramatic literature emeritus at Columbia University, said in another review that the book is “impressively argued.” He added that there is no question the manuscript “must have been somewhere in the background mix of Shakespeare’s mental landscape” while writing the plays." and the one below which starts, "In the dedication to his manuscript, for example, North urges those who might see themselves as ugly to strive to be inwardly beautiful, to defy nature. He uses a succession of words to make the argument, including “proportion,” “glass,” “feature,” “fair,” “deformed,” “world,” “shadow” and “nature.”" Though I'm far from being an expert in this area this is the first time I've heard of the above mentioned software being mentioned in the digital humanities or humanities computing context. Generally scholars use R or Python to perform computational stylometry. See this representative paper, for instance: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/eder-rybicki-kestemont.pdf https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016-1/eder-rybicki-ke...