“…the sum of emphasized words to the whole number is 449:865, or not far from 1:2. In the prose passage from Carlyle there is more than seventy per cent of emphasis, but the force-ratio of the present paragraph and the next is 25:45, or only fifty-five per cent.”
-L.A. Sherman, Analytics of Literature, 1893, p. 18. Quoted in Slote, 18.
Last week, Kay Walter, listening to my struggles with the complex mathematic of authorship attribution, suggested that I might want to sit down with Kari Ronning, who has worked on the Cather Journalism Project and has long been involved with preparing scholarly editions of Willa Cather’s texts, to discuss traditional methods of attribution.
An invigorating conversation with Kari raised a persistent theme of my work here, introduced by Steve Ramsay: namely that digital humanities seem to flourish, or at least unfold, at the strange intersection of scientific singularity and humanistic multiplicity. After my immersion in the positivism of computational authorship attribution, I was—I should confess—relieved to be swung back into the company of humanist—a humanist, to be clear, who was dedicated to establishing precise answers where they were needed, but who remained aware of particulars and incidentals, of authorship and influence, convention and imitation, uniqueness and derivation. How might computational methods of attribution, such as JGAAP, fit comfortably or logically into the humanists’ tool belt, allowing new, supplemental evidence to be gathered and collated with evidence procured through more traditional methods of attribution?
Later, when reading the essays that Bernice Slote included in her select bibliography of Cather’s writings on the ideas of art (The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896, University of Nebraska Press, 1966), I was intrigued to learn that Cather herself was strongly opposed to Professor L. A. Sherman’s theory of literary analytics movement, which was prevalent on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus while Cather was an undergraduate. Sherman, the chair of the English department, sought a scientific approach to literature, achieved through counting and computing the words of a number of authors.
Cather notably opposed this approach to literature, satirizing Sherman’s efforts in local publications. Her December 1893 “He Took Analytics” reads:
I am dying, Egypt, dying,
Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast;
And the dark Plutonian shadows
Gather on the evening blast;
Ah I counted, Queen, and counted,
And rows of figures massed
Till e’en my days are numbered,
And I’m counted out at last.
An excerpt from Sherman’s seminal work on the topic, which appears as the epigraph to this post, serves as a reminder that the computational approach to literature, while aided and expanded by modern technology, was alive and kicking in the 1890s. Authorial attribution tools have been sharpened and honed in the years since Sherman counted degrees of emphasis, with new statistical methods enunciated and expanded. And while Sherman’s writing appears, at first glance, to be ripe for satire, it also stands as an early instance—however flawed—of modern text analysis. To be sure, too, Cather’s anger at and dismissal of literary analytics speaks to an ongoing struggle over the worthiness and validity of these techniques. In my next—and final—post, I hope to circle back to this animating interdisciplinary tension and offer some final reflections on my summer in the digital cornfield.
(Image: “Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung Hambourg,” 1923. Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives&Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.)
