TU Darmstadt / ULB / TUprints

A Stylometric Analysis of Seneca’s Disputed Plays. Authorship Verification of Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus

Agapitos, Paschalis ; Cranenburgh, Andreas van (2024)
A Stylometric Analysis of Seneca’s Disputed Plays. Authorship Verification of Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus.
doi: 10.26083/tuprints-00027394
Report, Primary publication, Preprint

[img] Text
3919_StylometrySeneca_Conference_Version.pdf
Copyright Information: CC BY 4.0 International - Creative Commons, Attribution.

Download (449kB)
Item Type: Report
Type of entry: Primary publication
Title: A Stylometric Analysis of Seneca’s Disputed Plays. Authorship Verification of Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus
Language: English
Date: 28 May 2024
Place of Publication: Darmstadt
Issue Number: 1
Series: CCLS2024 Conference Preprints
Series Volume: 3
Collation: 31 Seiten
DOI: 10.26083/tuprints-00027394
Corresponding Links:
Abstract:

Seneca’s authorship of Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus is disputed. This study employs established computational stylometry methods based on character n-gram frequencies to investigate this case. Based on a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of stylistic similarities within the Senecan corpus, Octavia and Phoenissae emerge as outliers, while Hercules Oetaeus only stands out when the text is split in half. Subsequently, applying Bootstrap Consensus Trees (BCT) to a corpus of distractor texts, both disputed plays align with the Senecan cluster/branch. The General Impostors method confidently reports Seneca as the author of the disputed plays under various scenarios. However, upon closer examination of text segments, indications of mixed authorship arise. Based on computational stylometry, it appears that the disputed plays were in large part, but not wholly, written by Seneca.

Uncontrolled Keywords: Seneca, stylometry, authorship verification, Latin, Stylo
Status: Preprint
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-273946
Additional Information:

This paper has been submitted to the conference track of JCLS. It has been peer reviewed and accepted for presentation and discussion at the 3rd Annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies at Vienna, Austria, in June 2024.

Classification DDC: 800 Literature > 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
Divisions: 02 Department of History and Social Science > Institut für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Digital Philology – Modern German Literary Studies
Date Deposited: 28 May 2024 07:48
Last Modified: 31 Jul 2024 11:52
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/27394
PPN: 518965597
Export:
Actions (login required)
View Item View Item