Photo credit: NY Mag<\/a><\/p>\n Roth is an excellent figure for this project since he has created and sustained Nathan Zuckerman as a type of doppelg\u00e4nger-author over at least nine of his major novels. Following Exit Ghost<\/em> (2007) (Spoilers!<\/a>)\u00a0and Zuckerman\u2019s death, Roth then begins using another pseudo-autobiographical doppelg\u00e4nger, aptly named \u2018Philip Roth.\u2019 These two figures form a dialogic relationship in Roth\u2019s Facts: The Novelist\u2019s Autobiography <\/em>(1988). My questions is, just how different \u2013 stylistically \u2013 are Nathan Zuckerman and \u2018Philip Roth\u2019?<\/p>\n I have chosen to research stylometry to help answer this question since this kind of quantitative analysis of authorship is something I have not yet explored in my dissertation. Stylometry, or authorship attribution, is actually one of the earliest digital humanities projects with some methods even dating pre-computers. Typically, stylometry is used to determine the authorship of an unknown text by employing statistical and probability methods that look at literary style. As David Holmes explains<\/a>, \u201cAt [stylometry\u2019s] heart lies an assumption that authors have an unconscious aspect to their style, an aspect which cannot consciously be manipulated but which possesses features which are quantifiable and which may be distinctive.\u201d The effort to combine mathematical principles with literary style ultimately follows the theory that frequencies and patterns of words lengths, phrases, and even groups of letters could be used to determine authorship.<\/p>\n Stylometry methods have evolved significantly over time and therefore there is not yet a standard set of tools for scholars to use, since typically researchers design programs and code around the specifics of their projects. For example, in 1964 Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace\u00a0attempted stylometry without the aid of computers<\/a> in an effort to attribute the anonymous authorship of some of the Federalist Papers<\/em>\u00a0by painstakingly counting\u00a0the frequency of function words such as \u201cwhile\u201d and \u201cwhilst\u201d and comparing them to known patterns in authors such as Madison and Hamilton. Stylometry has also been used in an effort to settle some pretty contested debates<\/a> about the authorship of Shakespeare\u2019s plays<\/a>. Most recently, new stylometry programs have been used to uncover<\/a>\u00a0J.K. Rowling as the true author of Robert Galbraith\u2019s mystery novel The Cuckoo\u2019s Calling<\/em> (2013). However, while these projects were all used to determine unknown or concealed authorship, my question is if these methods can be useful in detecting variations across a textual corpus of a single known author.<\/p>\n![\"rothbooks\"](\"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/files\/2015\/06\/rothbooks-300x201.jpg\")
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