The Cycle of News in Chronicles from Eighteenth Century Holland: A Stylometric Approach

Scholars agree that cultural changes in early modern Europe (c. 1500-1800) were both accompanied and
precipitated by an information revolution. The use of printed media filtered down into local chronicles.
These are hand-written narratives produced usually by middle class authors, that recorded events and
phenomena they considered important (local politics, upheavals, climate, prices, crime, deaths). During
the seventeenth and eighteenth century, these chronicles came to include new topics deriving from a
greater variety of information sources. Authors frequently copied excerpts from earlier chronicles, official
documents, local announcements and by-laws, and increasingly copied or inserted printed material,
like ballads, pamphlets, and newspapers, without being explicit about the fact that they were copying.
This project focusses on automatically finding what parts of the chronicles contain the wordings
of the chronicler him(/her)self and what parts might be copied. We will apply both close reading and
computational stylometry techniques that are often used in authorship verification.

This project focused on automatically finding what parts of early modern chronicles contain the wordings of the chronicler him(/her)self and what parts might be copied. To do so they applied both close reading and computational stylometry techniques that are often used in authorship verification. It turned out that the automatic method worked very well in the case of an eighteenth century chronicle from Purmerend.

Through stylometric methods the majority of text fragments in the chronicle can be correctly labelled as either
the author’s own words, direct copies from sources or paraphrasing. Our results show that clustering text fragments based on
stylometric measures is an effective methodology for authorship verification of this document; however, this approach is less
effective when personal writing style is masked by author independent styles or when applied to paraphrased text.