Revisiting Authorship Attribution

Call for papers 

Revisiting Authorship Attribution

A SPECIAL ISSUE OF INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Stylometric authorship attribution research aims to reveal the connection of a text of unknown authorship to a specific author using a set of quantifiable text features as indicators of the author’s style. It is one of the oldest applications of quantitative methods in linguistic data with relevant studies based on manual counting of linguistic features dating back to the 15th century. 

Since the late 1990s, authorship attribution has known a new impetus based on developments in several key research areas such as Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. Furthermore, the machine-readable text is now massively available. Web 2.0 has added to the now standard internet genres of email, web page, and online forum messages, new forms of online expression such as blogs, tweets, and instant messaging. Moreover, since 2014, the NLP community was revolutionized by the rise of the word embeddings and the deep neural document representation models like BERT, which offered holistic textual representation models for all text mining tasks.

Authorship analysis research is now concerned not only with problems in the broad field of the Humanities (Literature, History, Theology) but also with applications in various law-enforcement tasks such as Intelligence, Forensics, etc. At the same time, a number of different research questions have been raised, including issues of author profile (gender, age, personality, etc.) that formed a broader research agenda and fostered the development of the broader field of computational stylistics.

In this rapidly changing research environment, authorship attribution methodology follows the evolution of text mining methods closely. The aim of this special issue is to capture the state-of-the-art in the field and give a broad coverage of the most active research areas. 

We invite proposals from scholars working on authorship attribution research regardless of application domain or language(s) involved. We are interested in approaches that address challenging aspects of authorship attribution and offer novel ideas to the field advancing the current state of the art. Topics can be related but are not limited to:

• Authorship attribution in the wild. Models and methods for big datasets
• Author verification
• New machine learning algorithms suited for authorship analysis research
• Software for authorship analysis research
• Authorship analysis in forensics
• Authorship attribution in small datasets
• Identification of novel features 
• Cross-linguistic and cross-topic authorship analysis

 About the Journal

The International Journal of Digital Humanities is a peer-reviewed academic journal with a focus on digital media and the development, application and reflection of digital research methodology in the humanities. It is concerned with the history, current practice and theory of digital humanities. Further details on this journal are available on the Springer website of IJDH.

Open access policy: the International Journal of Humanities is committed to making research results accessible for everyone for free. Contributors are not only allowed but encouraged to upload their papers to institutional repositories. Furthermore, Springer has agreements with a number of countries and institutions (see the full list at https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/funding/articles ), which allow respective researchers to publish open access. All Springer authors can distribute their work using a shareable link to the read-only full text of their paper (https://www.springernature.com/it/researchers/sharedit ).

All proposals must be written in English and submitted via e-mail to the following address: ijdh.journal@gmail.com. Proposals for articles must be submitted as an abstract of between 300 and 500 words. All submissions are due by October 3, 2021.

The program committee will review all submissions and send out notifications of acceptance/rejection by November 1, 2021. For questions, please send an email to ijdh.journal@gmail.com.

Full-length articles should be submitted via Editorial Manager by February 1, 2022: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ijdh/.

George Mikros, Patrick Juola, Maciej Eder, Guest editors

Gábor Palkó, Editor-in-Chief