“I would I had that corporal soundness”: Pervez Rizvi's Analysis of the Word Adjacency Network Method of Authorship Attribution

Abstract

In his two-part article ‘An Analysis of the Word Adjacency Network Method—Part 1—The evidence of its unsoundness’ and ‘Part 2—A true understanding of the method’ Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38: 347-78 (2022), Pervez Rizvi attempts to replicate the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method for authorship attribution and show that it does not produce the new knowledge that we, its inventors, claim for it. In the present essay, we will show that Rizvi misrepresents fundamental aspects of the WAN method, that his attempted replication fails not because the method is flawed but because he erred in replicating it, and that Rizvi misunderstands key aspects of the mathematics of Information Theory that the method uses.