Data used in Inference and Disputed Authorship

(work in progress)

This repository contains a reconstruction of the data used in Mosteller, Frederick, and David L Wallace. Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1964.

Mosteller and Wallace made use of 98 items of writing (Mosteller and Wallace 1964, 17):

• 48 by Hamilton
• 50 by Madison

Since Madison is the acknowledged writer of only 14 of The Federalist essays, 36 samples of Madison's writing come from "external" sources (Mosteller and Wallace 1964, 20). This repository collects those 36 samples, some of which are concatenations of shorter pieces of writing.

Reconstruct samples

Running make should result in mosteller-wallace-federalist-papers.csv appearing in the current directory.

Variables

mosteller-wallace-federalist-papers.csv is a document-term matrix. With the following two additional columns:

• code_number corresponds to the "code number" used by Mosteller and Wallace. In the case of The Federalist, the code number is the same as The Federalist number.
• AUTHOR is one of {HAMILTON, HAMILTON AND MADISON, HAMILTON OR MADISON, JAY, MADISON}. The samples with disputed authorship are those with AUTHOR equal to HAMILTON OR MADISON.

Sources

The Federalist

• Hamilton: 48 known papers
• Madison: 14 known papers

Obtained from federalist.csv was downloaded from http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~stine/mich/data/federalist.csv.

Madison samples exterior to The Federalist

These are described on pages 269 and 270 of Mosteller and Wallace (1964).

Misc

misc/swright/ contains files downloaded from http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~swright/525/project/ on 2016-03-01.