Home > Book > Analysing for Authorship

Analysing for Authorship

A Guide to the Cusum Technique

Author(s) Jill M. Farringdon

Hardback - £19.99

Language: English

Genre(s): Literary Criticism

June 1996 · 356 pages ·216x138mm

· Hardback - 9780708313244

About The Book

The need to attribute disputed utterance constantly arises, sometimes as a matter of legal urgency (contested 'confessions' or other documents), sometimes as the focus of fierce scholarly debate (was that new story just discovered really by D.H. Lawrence? QSUM finds not), sometimes as a popular diversion (whose words were on the 'Royal Tapes'?) It is in such situations that a scientific method of attribution - one which is objective - becomes desirable. The cumulative sum technique for authorship attribution (Cusum or QSUM, as the analytic procedure is now known) is just such a method. Invented in 1988 by Andre Q. Morton, long recognised as the foremost authority on the subject, QSUM is fully explained with copious illustrations. The technique works cross time and genre, and has already been used to solve several attribution problems. It has obvious uses in legal work, past and present (did Derek Bentley really make that confession? - again, QSUM finds not).

Endorsements

." . . a fascinating book. . .for the first time, the QSUM technique is explained in lucid detail, the objections to it are cogently refuted, and the method''s efficacy in solving particular problems of authorship attribution in literature and in law is, in a quite literal sense, graphically demonstrated. There is a remarkable chapter on the development of speech in Helen Keller. And there are literary examples aplenty, among them the authors of The Federalist papers (James Madison and Alexander Hamilton) and Mark Twain; D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, Tom Stoppard, Anthony Burgess - and Henry Fielding . . . There are pitfalls to be avoided, and technical subtleties to be mastered. . .Jill Farringdon carefully identifies these difficulties and, in prose that is clear and jargon free, tells us how to deal with them." -Professor Martin C. Battestin, Department of English, University of Virginia -- Professor Martin C. Battestin

About the Author(s)

Author(s): Jill M. Farringdon