DH Colloquia

SADiLaR organizes monthly Digital Humanities colloquia. These typically take place on Wednesdays (in the middle of the month) from 10:00 to 11:00 SAST. During these DH colloquia a wide variety of topics are discussed, mostly on content related to Digital Humanities, sometimes focusing more on the techniques or methodologies used, sometimes focusing more on the applications or application areas.

The DH colloquia are part of Escalator’s Explorer track. You can find more information on Escalator here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/, on Escalator’s championship programme here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/champions/overview/, and on the Explorer track within Escalator’s championship programme here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/champions/explorer/. Also check out the other tracks within the Escalator championship programme as there may be tracks directly related to your interests. If you want to be a member of the Digital Humanities community, you may also want to consider joining the DHCSSza Slack. This page will provide more information on how to join (this is also free): https://escalator.sadilar.org/connect/.

If you have suggestions for speakers at the DH colloquium (or if you want to speak yourself), or if you want to provide feedback, please do not hesitate to contact Prof Menno van Zaanen: menno.vanzaanen@nwu.ac.za.

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Title: An overview of Burrows’ Delta for authorship attribution

Speaker: Josef Langerman

Abstract: Authorship attribution is the task of determining the author of a given text based on the most frequent word usage. Burrows’ Delta has emerged as a robust and interpretable tool for this purpose. The method calculates the standardised differences in the most frequent word usage between a disputed text and the known works of potential authors. Empirical results from case studies demonstrate its efficacy across many languages. More work is needed to test this approach across the many official languages in South Africa. In this presentation, we will focus on using Burrows’ Delta for authorship attribution and show how it can be applied to the Greek New Testament and some Afrikaans novels. We also highlight some of the shortcomings of this approach.