Analyzing for Authorship

Analysing for Authorship is the first book to provide a clear and comprehensive guide to the cusum technique, a scientific method for the attribution of utterance.

     Attributing authorship is often a matter of legal urgency or fierce scholarly debate. Did Derek Bentley realy make that confession? Was that story just discovered really by D.H. Lawrence? The cusum (cumulative sum) technique (or QSUM), developed in 1988 by Andrew Q. Morton, is a recognition system applied to human utterance, whether written or spoken, based on analysing sequences of language units by a cumulative sum method of counting. Each person's QSUM 'fingerprint' retains consistency across his or her written and spoken utterance and across different genres.

     Problems addressed and illustrated in this book include the application of QSUM in legal and forensic cases (contested confessions and statements, anonymous letters); in providing or disaproving plagiarism; in identifying edited or translated test; in the analysis of authorship of disputed literary and theological texts. Jill Farringdon demonstrates the consistency of the QSUM fingerprint over time - for literary subjects and in the early utterance of children combined with their adult utterance. She also examines QSUM application to dialect and non-standard English.

     This book provides a full account of the cusum method, detailed instructions on how to make QSUM-charts, a wealth of illustrative examples and a real literary test case.