Authorship Ascription Research Articles

Who Authored On Liberty? Stylometric Evidence on Harriet Taylor Mill's Contribution

AbstractIt is well known that John Stuart Mill (JSM) repeatedly acknowledges Harriet Taylor Mill's (HTM) substantial contribution to On Liberty. After her death, however, he decides to publish the book under his name only. Are we justified in continuing this practice, initiated by JSM, of refusing unequivocal co-authorship status to HTM? Drawing on stylometric analyses, we make a preliminary case that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM had a hand in formulating it. Drawing on plausible standards for authorship ascription, we further point out that authorship status requires, in addition to a substantial contribution, the approval by all contributors. We discuss potential reasons to assume that HTM did not approve the published version of On Liberty and would have objected to including her name on the title page.

Reading the Popes: The Liber pontificalis and Its Editors

Reading the Popes: The <i>Liber pontificalis</i> and Its Editors

The rock art of Kondoa District, Tanzania

We review the history of rock art research in Kondoa District, Tanzania, specifically the area covered by the ‘Kondoa Rock Art Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site’. We examine why, after nearly a century of research, there is neither a broadly agreed upon stylistic sequence for the rock art of the area nor a clear ascription of authorship. We seek to provide a solution to this impasse by introducing a rigorous and systematised analytical approach that considers both the content of the art and the location in which it was situated. The findings of our analysis, as presented here, demonstrate three clearly identifiable traditions of art, each with elements of overlap and borrowing. We provide an evidence-based ascription of authorship to each tradition that confirms the ethnic complexity of the settlement of this area and lays the foundation for future studies of rock art interpretation and cultural interaction.

The Identity of the Author of the ‘Statement by an opponent of Cromwell’

The Statement has been well known to Cromwell scholars since its publication in the Camden Society volume edited by John Bruce and David Masson in 1875. It is a devastating indictment of Cromwell’s career in the early stages of the civil war. It accuses him of seeking to make the Isle of Ely a stronghold for those who shared his religious prejudices and of organising the army of the Eastern Association as an enclave for religious radicals. Both projects were designed to provide foci for resistance against the Presbyterian religious settlement demanded by the Scots and which was supported, if less aggressively so, by the dominant group in Parliament. But without any ascription of authorship, the Statement has been neglected in discussions by Cromwell’s biographers. In this article I argue that the writer was Lieutenant-Colonel William Dodson, and that his local experience and military service made him a knowledgeable commentator, if not an unprejudiced one, on Cromwell’s activities in the two years following the outbreak of the civil war.

Identification of Vivianite in Painted Works of Art and Its Significance for Provenance and Authorship Studies

Vivianite (Fe3(PO4)2·8H2O) is a rare blue historical pigment, which can be profitably used in authorship ascription or copy identification. However, its tendency to degrade complicates its proper identification in paint layers. Reference vivianite mineralogical samples were analysed in order to compare and to test the limits of structural analyses on possibly degraded vivianite samples (X‐ray diffraction and vibrational spectroscopies). The same methods, in their μ‐configuration, were tested on micro‐samples of the paintings and their limits evaluated. A sedimentary origin of the pigment has been suggested. Vivianite was detected in various works by Jean George de Hamilton (1672–1737) and in a Late Gothic Transylvanian altarpiece.

I didn't mean to hurt you! Unconscious origins of experienced self-agency over others' emotions.

Our conscious experiences of self-agency tell us that we cause and change other people's emotions during social interactions, even without awareness of what we did. How do such experiences of being the cause of an outcome, such as the emotions of others, emerge? Previous authorship ascription research suggests that unconsciously primed knowledge about emotions produces a sense of self-agency upon seeing the primed emotions expressed in another agent. Taking into account the crucial role of valence and the nature of one's own actions in understanding others' behaviors, we predicted that preactivated knowledge linked to a particular emotion, in terms of action or valence, increases experienced self-agency upon seeing the emotion in another agent. In four experiments, participants interacted with another agent and observed this agent's neutral expressions change into emotional expressions. Results showed that various kinds of subliminal primes enhance experienced self-agency over the observed emotions. Our findings support the idea that the unconscious authorship ascription process is less rigid when outcomes are socially meaningful.

Cultural and Universal Routes to Authorship Ascription: Effects of Outcome Priming on Experienced Self-Agency in the Netherlands and Japan

The experience of self-agency is a fundamental feature of human experience. Recent research has suggested that self-agency experiences are driven by an unconscious authorship ascription process that relies on an online match between accessible outcome representations and the production of the outcome. Extending this work, this study explores the role of culture in the manifestation of this unconscious authorship ascription process by testing whether subliminal priming of the outcome of an action prior to occurrence increased experiences of self-agency in Dutch and Japanese participants. Results show that outcome priming enhances the experience of self-agency independently of cultural background. However, Dutch participants experienced higher levels of self-agency than did Japanese participants, and this cultural effect was mediated by differences in beliefs of self-determination.These findings suggest that the experience of self-agency has a universal, nonconscious component that operates independently from a more cultural one, reflecting differences in conscious beliefs about the role of the self in choice and control.

Priming and authorship ascription: When nonconscious goals turn into conscious experiences of self-agency.

The conscious experience of self-agency (i.e., the feeling that one causes one's own actions and their outcomes) is fundamental to human self-perception. Four experiments explored how experienced self-agency arises from a match between nonconsciously activated outcome representations and the subsequent production of the outcome and explored specifically how implicit motivation to produce the outcome may impinge on this process. Participants stopped a rapidly presented sequence of colors on a computer screen. Subsequently, they were presented with what could be the color on which they had stopped the sequence or a color that was randomly chosen by the computer. Agency ratings after each trial revealed that priming outcomes (a specific color) just before the outcome was produced enhanced experienced self-agency. Importantly, priming outcomes relatively far in advance also augmented self-agency, but only if the outcome was attached to positive affect and thus operating as a nonconscious goal maintaining the outcome representation active over time. As such, these studies show how the mechanisms underlying nonconscious goal pursuit promote experiences of self-agency, thus integrating 2 lines of research that so far have led separate lives.

Unconscious authorship ascription: The effects of success and effect-specific information priming on experienced authorship

The experience of authorship arises when we feel that our own actions (e.g., pushing a light-switch) cause possible effects (e.g., the onset of a light). Two experiments tested the idea that authorship experiences may be driven by an unconscious authorship ascription process that relies on cues for a possible link between own actions and effects. Consistent with studies on self-attributions and success, Experiment 1 observed that subliminal priming of success enhanced feelings of control. Experiment 2 demonstrated that success-priming effects on authorship assessment resembled those of effect-specific information priming: Priming the possible effects of an action prior to their occurrence increased experiences of authorship in all participants, and success-priming only increased experienced authorship if effect information was not primed. These findings suggest that feelings of authorship result from expectations of matches that can be guided by enhanced accessibility of effect-specific information or the concept of success itself.

On the feeling of doing: Dysphoria and the implicit modulation of authorship ascription

The experience of authorship arises when we feel that observed effects (e.g., the onset of a light) are caused by our own actions (e.g., pushing a switch). This study tested whether dysphoric persons’ authorship ascription can be modulated implicitly in a situation in which the exclusivity of the cause of effects is ambiguous. In line with the idea that depressed individuals’ self-schemata include general views of uncontrollability, in a subliminal priming task we observed that dysphoric (compared with nondysphoric) participants experienced lower authorship of action effects when the self-concept was primed. Priming the potential effects of an action just prior to their occurrence, however, increased experiences of authorship in all participants and eliminated the effect of self-concept priming on dysphoric participants’ authorship experiences. These findings suggest that the human mental system seizes on a match between primed and actual action effect to establish a sense of authorship, even in a state of depression when persons have weak self-views of causing behavioral outcomes.

Linguistic Computing in the Shadow of Postmodernism

Determination of authorship, using methods such as those of Mosteller and Wallace, has been obliquely criticized by literary scholars for years. However, the most radical critique of these methods has, under the umbrella term ‘theory’, emerged since the 1960s in the writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. Thanks to their influence, authorship attribution is now distinguished from authorship ascription with only the latter applying to literary and linguistic computing. Various criticisms are examined in detail. Useful as these criticisms are, the philosophical roots of the postmodernist critiques are destructive of any attempt to discover who wrote what.

The Frontiers of Literature

Our understanding of literature is haunted by question: where does literature properly end, and where do history, formal games, or moral didacticism begin? In this book, author questions what literature is by scouting frontiers it shares with four other types of written expression. These include narrative dimension of history, expressive element in poetry, didactic and religious functions, and relationship between poetry and other playful, rule-bound forms. He examines how literature draws from these discrete frontier states while remaining, finally, distinct from them all, and advocates a broad and heterogeneous understanding of where literature exists in relation to its neighbours. The second part of book explores material fringes of book as book, turning from soul to body, as it were. The title, ascription of authorship, preface, concluding retraction, and those uncertain edges represented by rejected drafts, authorial and editorial comment, all these comprise literal, littoral peripheries of book itself, paradoxically demanding to be taken into account, and to be ignored in any account of the book.

Fiddler's Farewell: The Legend of the Hanged Fiddler

The legend of the is a part of the larger tradition of last goodnights, songs ofcondemned men reputedly composed and sung by them. Execution ballads have been fairly common in Western European tradition since the seventeenth century, and in most cases we can assign authorship to professional ballad makers whose productions were printed on broadsides and sold to crowds witnessing the execution. Although we recognize the confession ballad as a convention, we are in no position to state categorically that no criminal ever composed his own goodnight. The ascription of authorship is, like the legend of the lovers' leap, a saga. But people have a habit of living up to their legends. As lovers may leap off a cliff because they are expected to, so may a criminal compose a farewell because he feels it is customary and therefore necessary. I have found attested examples of prisoners who remodelled older songs to fit their experiences. We must, therefore, approach each legend as we approach each folk song, as a study in itself within the larger study of an entire tradition. And the study of the hanged fiddler bids fair to become a study of a large part of the entire goodnight tradition.