On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship

Stylometric Analyses of the Book of Mormon: A Short History

The abundance of skeptical theories about who wrote the Book of Mormon has led many scholars to seek scientific data to discover the answer. One technique is stylometry. Having first been developed in the 1850s, stylometry seeks to find the “wordprint” of a text. Although these stylistic studies are not as accurate as a human’s fingerprint, they can give researchers a good idea either of differ...

Testing Authorship in the Personal Writings of Joseph Smith Using NSC Classification

In a co-authored paper (Jockers et al. 2008), my colleagues and I employed both delta and nearest shrunken centroid (NSC) classification in an authorship analysis of the Book of Mormon. Our results suggested that several men involved in the early formation of the Mormon Church might have been contributors to the Book of Mormon. For reasons detailed in that paper, and summarized again here, we e...

Examining a Misapplication of Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification to Investigate Book of Mormon Authorship

Another Perspective on Vocabulary Richness

This article examines the usefulness of vocabulary richness for authorship attribution and tests the assumption that appropriate measures of vocabulary richness can capture an author’s distinctive style or identity. After briefly discussing perceived and actual vocabulary richness, I show that doubling and combining texts affects some measures in computationally predictable but conceptually sur...

Not Your Everyday Wordprint Study: Variations on a Theme

Roger R. Keller. Book of Mormon Authors: Their Words and Messages. Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1996. xiii + 214 pp., with index and appendix of word clusters. $16.95. Reviewed by John A. Tvedtnes Not Your Everyday Wordprint Study: Variations on a Theme Roger R. Kelter, a former Presbyterian minister converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is current ly a pro...