Attributing Authorship in the Noisy Digitized Correspondence of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm | Digital Humanities
Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Joris van Zundert): Apart from its buoyant conclusion that authorship attribution methods are rather robust to noise (transcription errors) introduced by optical character recognition and handwritten text recognition, this article also offers a comprehensive read on the application of sophisticated computational techniques for testing and validation in a data curation process.
This article presents the results of a multidisciplinary project aimed at better understanding the impact of different digitization strategies in computational text analysis. More specifically, it describes an effort to automatically discern the authorship of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a body of uncorrected correspondence processed by HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) and OCR (Optical Character Recognition), reporting on the effect this noise has on the analyses necessary to computationally identify the different writing style of the two brothers.
Original date of publication: 05/04/2018