Lincoln the Movie and Lincoln the Author

As Lincoln the movie is poised to arrive “in a theater near you,” an update on Abraham Lincoln the author is given by Dr. Patrick Juola, associate professor of computer science, and his software engineering team.

Four new letters to the editor have been attributed to Lincoln because of the joint research by Juola’s team and the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project in Springfield, Ill.

Working with a $50,000 grant from the Office of Digital Humanities, the project is using new computer software to examine newspaper articles from the years Lincoln served in the Illinois legislature (1834-1842). The software, developed by Juola with engineers John Noecker Jr. and Mike Ryan, uses an atypical algorithm to determine authors based upon style and use of the language. In the project Is That You, Mr. Lincoln?: Applying Authorship Attribution to the Early Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, they are trying to determine which articles Lincoln may have written anonymously or under a pen name.

Juola and his team have encountered some hurdles. The first is working with old, fragile documents on aged newsprint that is just hard to process. The second, Juola said, is Lincoln’s style.

Juola makes a comparison with speech recognition programs, which divide users into sheep and goats. Sheep have those easy-to-recognize, distinct voices while goats are more nondescript, less inconsistent—and less easy targets for comics to imitate.

In speech recognition terms, Juola said, Lincoln is a goat. “Despite these hurdles,” Juola said, “John has managed to identify so far four disputed works that we believe are by Lincoln. With hundreds of potential articles available, the work is just beginning.”

Catch his explanation of the project on YouTube.