An analysis of the Word Adjacency Network method—Part 1—The evidence of its unsoundness

Abstract

Abstract A new mathematical method for authorship attribution, known as the Word Adjacency Network method, has emerged and its inventors have claimed a high success rate with it. They have announced that their method has shown that Christopher Marlowe wrote some scenes in the Henry VI trilogy of plays, an attribution which has made newspaper headlines. This first part of a two-part paper replicates the method’s success in attributing complete plays but demonstrates that it cannot be relied on to attribute individual scenes correctly, particularly where Marlowe is a candidate author. It shows by examining the method’s calculations that its unreliability is due to its mass exclusion of relevant evidence, that exclusion being necessitated by its use of a mathematical formula which can now be seen to be unsuited to the texts of early modern plays.