Who has argued what about the writer, by what method, and how well it held up. This unit holds the authorship questions of the case: whether the letters share one author, whether any candidate text can be attributed, and what the methods used to argue either way can actually support. Claim pages are being assembled; each will carry its author, its method, and its critics.
The working vocabulary lives in Concepts & Methods — idiolect, stylometry, authorship attribution, authorship profiling, the base-rate problem, likelihood ratios. The questioned documents themselves are filed under the letters and the ciphers.
Sources that bear on authorship
Method texts (see Sources for the full corpus):
- The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics — survey of the field, including authorship and speaker profiling chapters.
- An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence — casework-driven introduction; idiolect and attribution.
- Forensic Linguistics (Olsson & Luchjenbroers) — textbook treatment of authorship and variation.
- Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework — practitioner methods, including profiling and questioned documents.
- Wordcrime — case narratives of authorship work.
- Speaking of Crime — language of criminal justice; attribution in legal settings.
Key papers in the harvested corpus:
- McMenamin (2002), Forensic Linguistics — forensic stylistics.
- Chaski (2005) — authorship attribution in digital evidence.
- Stamatatos (2008) — survey of modern attribution methods.
- Brennan et al. (2012) — adversarial stylometry: attribution under disguise.
- Wright (2014) — stylistics versus statistics.
- Nini (2015) and Nini (2019) — forensic authorship profiling.
- Argamon (2018) — promises and pitfalls of computational analysis.
- Savoy (2020) — machine-learning methods for stylometry.
- Grant (2022) — the idea of progress in forensic authorship analysis.
- Nini (2024) — idiolect and forensic authorship analysis.
Recorded lectures and talks by practitioners (Grant, Nini, Chaski, Leonard, Coulthard and others) are filed under Curated talks & videos in Sources.