How the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) works. (8th October 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Brown, Paul; Eisen, Mark; Segarra, Santiago; Ribeiro, Alejandro; Egan, Gabriel
• Is Part Of: Digital scholarship in the humanties. Volume 37:Number 2(2022)
• Page Start: 321
• Page End: 335
• Publication Date: 2021-10-08
• Subjects: Philology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Computational linguistics -- Periodicals; 410.285
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqab002
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2055-768X

Abstract

Abstract: The Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method is a newly invented method for attributing the authorship of texts based on internal evidence about the proximities of high-frequency words in those texts. The method has been the subject of mathematically rigorous explanations in scientific journals and here is offered instead a relatively non-technical account for humanist readers unfamiliar with advanced mathematical nomenclature. The description will refer to the operation of the algorithm as it is implemented in a newly completed open-source, open-access version that the authors have made available for free unlimited download on the WorldWide Web.