Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim - Times Online

Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim - Times Online

and

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091020/us_time/08599193097100

Following a blurb on Yahoo! news, I found this neat article from Times Online, in conjunction with a Time.com article, discussing how a distinguished Shakespearean authority, Sir Brian Vickers, used plagiarism detection software to determine authorship of the history play Edward III.

Some background concerning this literary mystery: there's been a mystery for over 400 years as to whether Shakespeare co-authored Edward III with Thomas Kyd. The earliest copies of the play are unattributed and was published anonymously in 1596. The possibility of Edward III being penned, in part, by Shakespeare has been debated back and forth and was completely ignored by mainstream publication until 1997.

The plagiarism software, called Pl@giarism and developed at the University of Maastricht, was created to help educators catch cases of plagiarism. Pl@giarism operates by comparing all documents in a specified directory or by scanning the internet for files or works that match a phrase from the document being scrutinized.

Sir Brian Vickers, in his study of Shakespeare and other period works, came up with the concept of a "lingusitic fingerprint," in other words, playwrights often use the same patterns of speech. Vickers argues that, while it is established that a group or society can share common words three word phrases, it is pretty unlikely for a match of metaphors and unusual parts of speech to come up unless it was written by the same person due to the concept of the linguistic fingerprint.


Vickers came up with 200 matches when he tested Edward III with Shakespeare's work published before 1596. The average match rate is 20 matches. The 200 matches that Vickers came up with, in terms of relevancy, to use a database term, is a pretty strong indication that the provenance of four scenes in Edward III can be given to Shakespeare. Vickers tested a series of "recycled" phrases such as "come in person hither," or "thou art thyself" and whole phrases like "lilies that fester smell worse than weeds," and sure enough, there were some closely related matches in Edward III!

The article ends with Vickers stating his hope that further computer developments can be made in order to help prove provenance of major anonymous works and that the English literature field will come to utilize such handy materials in their study of text.

In the light of what we've been talking about in class and how this ties in with digital curation, I thought that these two articles and the project it discussed, proved to be a compelling example of how the cyberinfrastructure can transform and add a new dimension to research in the humanities and essentially put to rest some stubborn mysteries that have plagued the English academia.