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Christopher SmithMay 4, 2010REL 441 HC, American ScripturesDr. Richard Bushman
The Urantia Book as a Test Case for Statistical Authorship Attribution in Genre-Distinctive Texts
IntroductionA recent statistical study of the Book of Mormon by Matthew Jockers, Daniela Witten,and Craig Criddle (hereafter Jockers, et. al.) attempted to determine who authored that book bymeasuring a set of word frequencies for each chapter and comparing them to word frequencies intexts known to have been penned by a set of candidate authors. The word frequencies wereanalyzed using two related classifications: Delta and Nearest Shrunken Centroids (NSC). Intheir control tests, the authors found both classifications to be quite accurate, with NSC emergingas a slightly more robust technique.
Application of the classifications to the Federalist Papersresulted in similarly encouraging results, with Delta producing only three cross-validation errorsand NSC producing none.
Although the Federalist Papers are a classic case, however, they are not reallycomparable to the Book of Mormon. According to Shlomo Argamon, the assumptions of word-frequency analysis “fundamentally limit use of the method [to cases in which] all the samples(from all authors) are of pretty much the same textual variety, otherwise we would expect theword frequency distributions over the comparison set to be a mixture of several disparatedistributions, one for each genre found in the set, thus potentially biasing results depending onthe variety of the test text.”
The Jockers and Witten study of the Federalist Papers satisfied thiscriterion, but the Jockers, et. al. study of the Book of Mormon unequivocally did not.
In the Jockers, et. al. study of the Book of Mormon, the individual candidate authors’“wordprints” were based largely on texts of a single genre or style, with a different genre predominating for each author. Very few of the samples were of a similar type to the Book of Mormon. Under these conditions, we would expect the control samples to be reliably attributedto the proper author even if—perhaps
especially
if—the Delta method is highly sensitive to genreand context. If the method is genre-sensitive, however, we would expect to obtain
much less
accurate results when testing the candidate authors against a text of a different genre, such as theBook of Mormon.
The present study applies the Delta word frequency classification method to the UrantiaBook (also known as the Urantia Papers), a religious text in many respects comparable to theBook of Mormon. Like the Book of Mormon, the Urantia Book is highly distinctive in its genreand style. Also like the Book of Mormon, the Urantia Book claims to have been authored by anumber of divinely inspired superhuman narrators. Skeptics of each book, meanwhile, disagreeas to whether each had a single human author or is the product of a multiple-author conspiracy.If the Delta attribution method can produce meaningful results when applied to the UrantiaBook, it would tend to bolster its applicability to the Book of Mormon and to other, similar cross-genre cases.Unfortunately, the method turns out to be of dubious usefulness in choosing amongcandidate authors. When the 197 Urantia Papers were tested against seven candidate authors,including three likely candidates and four control authors, the large majority of the Papers wereattributed to two of the control authors: Sigmund Freud and myself. Only a very few of thePapers were attributed to the candidate who, from other evidence, seems to be their most likelyauthor. Similarly, a test of the text’s internal authorship claims turned out to be moderately
successful in choosing the correct narrator, but it is difficult to assess the significance of thisfinding, given that narrator and genre tended to be covariates. The method turns out to be highlyrobust for determining the genre of a text, which demonstrates that it is very context-sensitive.Another application of the method turned out to be more fruitful. In addition to genre,the method also turns out to be somewhat sensitive to changes in an author’s style over
time
.Controlling for genre, we can use the method to chart stylistic trends
within
the Book. The basically linear developmental trend that emerges is suggestive of unitary rather than multipleauthorship.The Urantia Authorship ControversyThe story of the Urantia Book began sometime between 1906 and 1911, when psychologist and former Adventist minister William S. Sadler examined an individual known asthe “sleeping subject” (probably Wilfred Kellogg), whose wife was concerned about his“abnormal movements” while sleeping. To Sadler’s surprise, Kellogg began to speak in hissleep, claiming to be “a student visitor on an observation mission from another planet.” Sadler was initially skeptical, but eventually came to believe that this was an authentic spiritual phenomenon. A group called “the Forum” formed in 1923, and asked questions of the celestial beings that were then put to the sleeping subject by Sadler and the five other members of the“Contact Commission”. Answers to the Forum’s questions were provided as formal essaysknown as the Urantia Papers. The Forum and the Commission were sworn to secrecy about theidentity of the sleeping subject and the mode by which the Book was received, for fear that people would become preoccupied with these details rather than studying the Book itself. Sadler insisted, however, that the Book was not received through channeling or automatic writing. He
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