The Authorship in Modern American Textbooks (AMAT) is a multi-phase digital humanities project aimed at identifying and analyzing trends in authorship of American textbooks. Ultimately, the project will encompass internal (style, themes, presentation) and external (biographical information, correspondence, publishing information, etc.) evidence to analyze and map the authorship of the modern American textbook. AMAT launched in January of 2018. The initial phases of AMAT is dedicated to building a corpus and identifying authorship markers within textbooks. These first stages include gathering, digitizing, and cleaning texts, as well as, textual analysis which looks for variation among authors by examining word counts, sentence length, parts of speech, and type-token ratio (TTR).
Funding
AMAT is supported by Digital Drew. Funded by the Andrew E. Mellon foundation, Digital Drew is an interdisciplinary digital humanities initiative at Drew University.
