”I read your Facebook post and (I think) I know who you are”, part 2: A mini-experiment on author psychology assessment

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In part 1 on this blog, “A mini-history of author analysis”, I pointed out that attempting to draw conclusions about the author of a text based on traits of the text alone has a long tradition in forensics (identifying perpetrators or revealing forgeries), literary studies (authorship identification) and psychology (from psychoanalysis to modern customer/consumer behavior studies). In its modern, machine learning version, psychological author profiling is often based on the ”Big Five” model (see figure 1) going back to McCrae & Costa 1989.

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But how do human readers decode and interpret concrete features of text as to its authors personality?

In order to find preliminary answers to this question, I performed a mini-experiment in my lesson on “Communicative …

”I read your Facebook post and (I think) I know who you are”, part 1: A mini-history of author analysis

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Attempting to draw conclusions about the author of a text based on traits of the text alone has a long tradition. It has been a topic of interest in forensics (identifying perpetrators or revealing forgeries), literary studies (authorship identification) and psychology (from psychoanalysis to modern customer/consumer behavior studies). In 15th Century Italy, Lorenzo Valla proved the forgery of the Donation of Constantine based on anachronistic word choice (8th, and not 4th, century A.D.) and poor grammar. Contending the authorship of certain texts previously attributed to Shakespeare goes back to the end of the 17th Century and builds on the philological methods stemming from biblical and classic studies, developed in the Renaissance period, analyzing language style (word choice and grammar). In …

Why has a rape only “allegedly” taken place?

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Editor’s note: This is a translation of an article originally written in Danish based on a Danish study. The conclusions thus apply to a Danish context, and whether or not they could be true for other contexts/languages is not considered here.

When journalists write articles on burglaries, they most often describe them as events that are matter of fact. There is no reason to question whether the victim really had their tv, computer or valuable jewelry stolen. The same goes for robberies – the journalist does not question whether the victim of the crime has actually had their wallet and phone stolen in broad daylight. The same, however, does not apply to sexual assault or rape. Here, the journalist usually …

The complicated femininity of “Sut Min Klit”

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How many of you have felt personally victimized by Nikoline?[1] The list of her targets in “Sut Min Klit” (Danish for “Suck my clit”) is long: her male peers, pedophiles, rapists, religious leaders (all of them grouped as sexual predators in the same way), and even other women. Nikoline’s recently unleashed song and video one-two punch is impossible to ignore, both perfectly designed to provoke a strong reaction. (Listen to the song here).

The song has generated headlines since it was released. Can you consider Nikoline a feminist? Are people as offended when there’s a man behind lyrics like these? Isn’t her inflexible standpoint as bad as the extremism she denounces? These are all questions that can spark …