A Look at “Defoe’s Contributions to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis,” By Irving N. Rothman et al.—Are the Results Valid?

Abstract

This paper is a reply to an article written by Irving N. Rothman, Rakesh Verma, Thomas M. Woodell, and Blake Whitaker—“Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis” (2017). That study claimed to support the consensus of traditional attribution studies that Madagascar; or, Robert Drury’s Journal (1729) is a collaborative work to which Defoe contributed. This paper points out the many flaws of the Rothman group’s attribution study—flaws not only in the nontraditional authorship attribution experimental plan but also in the eighteenth-century literary and editorial production aspects of their paper. Rothman et al.’s work was based on Stieg Hargevik’s non-traditional authorship study of Memoirs of an English Officer which in turn was based on Alver Ellegård’s non-traditional authorship work on the Junius Letters. This paper also explicates the errors carried over by the Rothman group from the Hargevik and Ellegård studies. The conclusion of this paper is that the Rothman group’s results are not valid.

Keywords

• defoe
• daniel defoe
• authorship
• attribution
• statistics
• stylistics
• accountability