title: An information theoretic clustering approach for unveiling authorship affinities in Shakespearean era plays and poems.
abstract: In this paper we analyse the word frequency profiles of a set of works from the Shakespearean era to uncover patterns of relationship between them, highlighting the connections within authorial canons. We used a text corpus comprising 256 plays and poems from the 16th and 17th centuries, with 17 works of uncertain authorship. Our clustering approach is based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence and a graph partitioning algorithm, and our results show that authors' characteristic styles are very powerful factors in explaining the variation of word use, frequently transcending cross-cutting factors like the differences between tragedy and comedy, early and late works, and plays and poems. Our method also provides an empirical guide to the authorship of plays and poems where this is unknown or disputed.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Ahmed Shamsul
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Arefin
authors.affiliation: Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Renato
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vimieiro
authors.affiliation: Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Riveros
authors.affiliation: Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Hugh
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Craig
authors.affiliation: Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Moscato
mesh_terms: D001319:Authorship / Q000266:history*; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D004324:Drama / Q000266:history*; D004739:England; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011037:Poetry as Topic / Q000266:history*