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

Review of Matthew L. Jockers, Daniela M. Witten, and Craig S. Criddle. “Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23/4 (2008): 465–91.

Editor’s note: The above-referenced essay by Jockers, Witten, and Criddle (hereafter Criddle and associates) was answered by G. Bruce Schaalje, Paul J. Fields, Matthew Roper, and Gregory L. Snow in a technical paper entitled “Extended nearest shrunken centroid classification: A new method for open-set authorship attribution of texts of varying sizes,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 26/1 (2011): 71–88. We have invited Fields, Schaalje, and Roper to provide both a popularization of this important essay and a brief history of efforts to use what is called stylometry to identify the authors of disputed texts. In addition, because Professor Criddle has been involved in efforts to resuscitate the Spalding-Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorship, Roper and Fields were also invited to comment on that rather moribund explanation in a separate essay that immediately follows this one.