Reassessing Authorship of the Book of Mormon Using Delta and Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification
Literary and Linguistic Computing
2008
23
no.4
2008
465-491
Authors Jockers, Witten, and Criddle begin this paper with an overview of the authorship possibilities people have used to prove and disprove the Book of Mormon over the years, from the early 1830's to the present. Using two classification techniques to determine Book of Mormon authorship (one technique is called 'delta', the other is called 'nearest shrunken centroid'), the authors examine 239 text segments from the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon and compared them with 217 samples of writing from Spaulding, Rigdon, Cowdery, Pratt, and others. The results are published in a chart.