Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Review of&nbsp;Jean Huets. With Walt Whitman: Himself in the Nineteenth Century, in America

O'Neil, Brandon James

Jean Huets. With Walt Whitman: Himself in the Nineteenth Century, in America.

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 36, no. 2/3

Lin, Hsinmei

Starry Nights: Whitman, Epilepsy, and Van Gogh

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Fall 2018/Winter 2019

Folsom, Ed

McMullen, Kevin

Schöberlein, Stefan

Stacy, Jason

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NOTES
WALT WHITMAN AT THE AURORA: A MODEL FOR 
JOURNALISTIC ATTRIBUTION
Relatively little manuscript material exists to definitively tie Walt 
Whitman to the bulk of the journalistic writing attributed to him, 
particularly the writing in the early years of his career. Because the 
vast majority of his early journalistic work was unsigned, attribution 
is most often based on the knowledge of Whitman’s involvement with 
a given paper, coupled with the identification of some sort of Whit-
manic voice or tone in a given piece of writing. However, a writer’s 
style and tone are often affected by the form and context in which 
they are writing, meaning that Whitman’s journalistic voice is often 
quite different than his poetic voice, which is in turn different than his 
prose fiction voice. Furthermore, certain similarities of style and tone 
are found across a given genre; many nineteenth-century newspaper 
editorials sound quite similar, for example, making any discussion of 
authorship in nineteenth-century periodicals rife with uncertainty. 
Therefore, even for the most knowledgeable scholars, a belief that 
Whitman was the author of a given piece of journalism generally rests 
upon a trust in the tradition of attributing a piece to Whitman, with 
skepticism arising only in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. 
Last year, the editorial team overseeing the treatment of Whitman’s 
journalism for the Walt Whitman Archive decided to add an editorial 
note to the metadata at the top of each text file, explaining the Archive’s 
rationale for attributing a piece to Whitman. In the note, we lay out all 
of the factors—including the piece’s attribution history—that influ-
enced our decision to present the piece as likely authored by Whitman. 
We also embedded, within the TEI encoding, an expression of our 
level of certainty in Whitman’s authorship. Finally, we noted in the 
metadata whether and how the piece was signed by Whitman in the 
original publication. These measures are an attempt to foreground 
for users the inherent uncertainty of authorship in nineteenth-cen-
tury periodical materials. But they also offer the opportunity to begin 
thinking about how we might move beyond traditional methods of 
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attribution.
Lately, staff members who work on Whitman’s journalism have 
begun to apply the tools of computational linguistics to bolster attri-
bution claims.  To test these tools, we chose a corpus of texts gener-
ally ascribed to Whitman by traditional attribution methods—the 
editorials from the New York Aurora—and applied a bootstrapped 
classification task, using the classify-function of stylo for R.1 On its 
most fundamental level, our method constitutes a comparison of texts 
turned into ranked lists. A reader might think of these as a comparison 
of shopping lists: if some nebulous entity were to collect a life’s worth 
of said lists and compile them into an inventory of “most frequently 
bought groceries,” one could statistically assess how close a set of 
newly-discovered shopping lists is to this assembled list. While schol-
arship in the field tends to rely on lists of most frequent words (as 
“items” on our “shopping lists”),2 our assessment uses most frequent 
character trigrams (strings of three characters as they appear in text).
This particular technique was used previously by members of our 
group to assess Whitman’s contribution to the Brooklyn Daily Times3
and has shown promising results, especially for shorter corpora.4 The 
authorial corpus for Whitman consisted of a version of “Manly Health 
and Training” with potentially plagiarized passages excised5 as well 
as Whitman’s confirmed contributions to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 
Against this corpus, and the corpora of fifteen other contemporary 
authors, we then compared the Aurora pieces. To ensure accuracy and 
reduce false positives, we not only relied on a sizable pool of candidates6
but each attribution was also repeated thousands of times, each time 
with minor variations to the assessment, with only consensus results 
considered positive attributions. 
For an initial round of assessment, all contributions identi-
fied by Bergman, Noverr, and Recchia in The Collected Writings of 
Walt Whitman: The Journalism, vol. I (1834-1846),7 spanning from 
February 28 to April 28 of 1842, were grouped together and a bootstrap 
consensus tree was produced. In this method, proximity of authorial 
voice is illustrated as lines radiating from a center, with each “branch” 
representing a significant difference in authorial voice.
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Figure 1. Bootstrap consensus tree for authorial corpora and Auro-
ra texts, marked as “UC” (“unknown corpus”) here (1801 Burrows’ 
Delta-attributions on most frequent character trigram-lists from, in-
crementally growing from top 200 to 2000).
Figure 1 clearly shows that from all authorial corpora provided, Whit-
man’s voice is by far the most similar (i.e. “least distant” in terms of 
compared lists) to the voice present in the Aurora corpus (“UC”): 
both voices have their own branch on the upper right corner of the 
consensus tree.
To get a more detailed view, we then grouped the writings in ques-
tion by calendar week, and attributed based on lists of most frequent 
character trigrams, growing from top 200 to top 2,000 in increments 
of 1, and employing three difference measure of distance (Burrows’ 
delta, Nearest Shrunken Centroid, Support Vector Machines). The 
results can be seen in Figure 2.
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Figure 2. Percentage of attributions to Whitman of New York Aurora
editorials grouped by week (in 1842), using NSC, SVM and Burrows’ 
Delta (1801 attributions on most frequent character trigram-lists, incre-
mentally growing from top 200 to 2000). Corpus size is listed in kb. 
The data clearly suggests Whitman as the author of the vast 
majority of editorials attributed to him by Bergman, Noverr, and 
Recchia between March 7 and April 23 of 1842. Since Whitman was 
only announced as editor in the March 28 issue of the Aurora, it 
appears that the owners of the paper, Anson Herrick and John Ropes, 
assigned Whitman editorial duties soon after Thomas Low Nichols 
was fired as editor in February, but only announced Whitman’s new 
position at the end of the month. 
 Given the limited data available for the first week (12kb / two 
editorials), a second round of assessment was performed, in which we 
multiplied the existing data by a factor of ten, which can help improve 
attribution success (see Figure 3).
While attribution rates for the first-week corpus went up slightly 
when its corpus was multiplied, it still could not comfortably be 
attributed to Whitman: NSC still failed to assign it to Whitman in any 
of its 1,801 attributions. Still, this does not exclude Whitman as the 
author but merely underscores a need for more data. With more texts 
available at the margins of Whitman’s likely editorship, the exact period 
of his tenure could be narrowed down more precisely. The current 
state of the data does not allow us to make a clear determination as 
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111
to the beginning or the end of 
this period.
Additionally, we decided 
to assess a particular set of texts 
as a thematic group, namely 
those that exhibited strong 
nativist sentiments towards 
Irish Catholics in New York. 
These editorials centered 
around the funding debate over 
the Public School Society in 
which Whig Governor William 
Seward supported public 
funding for Catholic schools 
in an attempt to pull Irish 
Catholic New Yorkers away 
from the Democratic Party.8 
Considering their varying 
placement in the paper, we also assessed these themed texts grouped 
first as “leaders”—providing commentary on the most pertinent topic 
of the day in the first column on page two of each issue—and secondly 
as regular editorials. As expected, given the overall positive attribu-
tion, all three groupings were clearly attributed to the authorial signal 
of Whitman. 
Figure 4. Assessment of nativist editorials, in percent, divided into leaders 
and regular contributions,9 using NSC, SVM and Burrows’ delta (1801 
attributions on most frequent character 3gram-lists, incrementally growing 
from top 200 to 2000). 
Figure 3. Additional bootstrapping 
performed on first (02/28-03/05) 
week of assessment, using NSC, 
SVM and Burrows’ Delta (1801 
attributions on most frequent 
character trigram-lists, incrementally 
growing from top 200 to 2000).
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To ensure that the attribution has no accidental Whitman-bias 
or any other observable data-distortion, we included a text that 
should clearly fail attribution: Emerson’s “American Scholar.”10 Since 
Emerson’s voice was not included among our comparison corpora, 
“American Scholar” should not pass our benchmark for positive attri-
bution (positive attributions for all three statistical methods). The 
results were a scattershot attribution across various authors: Delta 
attributed to Fuller (90.4%), Tucker (8.2%), or Brooks (1.4%), SVM 
to Greeley (68.4%), English (18.3%), or Starhawk (13.3%), while NSC 
attributed to Greeley (68.4%), Fuller (23.9%), or English (7.6%). There 
was no consistent misattribution across different measures of distance: 
the real author could not be identified, and the results reflect this 
clearly. In addition to what was gleaned from previous assessments 
of the method (see footnote 4), this on-the-fly test confirmed that 
non-attribution did not result in misattribution. 
Our analysis of Whitman’s Aurora editorials therefore confirms 
the scholarly consensus that Whitman was author of most of the Aurora 
material attributed to him, and perhaps resolves the longstanding 
debate as to whether the nativist articles found in the Aurora in the 
spring of 1842 were also penned by Whitman. Until now, the tradi-
tional attribution model of interpreting style and applying historical 
inference has led to conflicting conclusions about Whitman’s author-
ship of these nativist pieces. The differences lie in determining both 
whether Whitman actually wrote these pieces, and, if he did, whether 
he believed them. David Reynolds calls Whitman’s anti-Irish state-
ments during this period a “strange dance” where the future poet “took 
the nativist side on several key questions,” but ultimately “resisted thor-
oughgoing nativism” by rejecting the platform of the Native American 
Party and calling for benevolence toward newcomers.11 Jerome Loving, 
on the other hand, finds it “difficult to believe that [Whitman] partic-
ipated comfortably in the xenophobic ‘Native American’ campaign 
the Aurora launched in March and April” and reminds us that the 
co-owners of the newspaper, Anson Herrick and John Ropes, “prob-
ably did more than simply ‘inspire’ its opinions.” 12 For Loving, the 
Aurora’s nativism “matches more with the language of Herrick and 
Ropes’s [later] denunciation of Whitman,” making “it . . . beyond even 
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113
the power of miraculous transformation . . . to think the spouter of 
these xenophobic editorials is the same person who . . . wrote Leaves 
of Grass.” Joann Krieg argues that the “language Whitman employed 
was that of his readers” and implies that the young Whitman parroted 
the nativism of his subscribers.13 While it is unlikely scholars will ever 
determine whether Whitman meant his critique of “insidious traitors 
from abroad,”14 we can now definitively say, at least according to the 
computational model employed in this analysis, that Walt Whitman 
was the author of the nativist editorials published in the Aurora in the 
spring of 1842. 
 These computational assessments are the Archive’s latest effort 
to bring both renewed focus and a measure of clarity to Whitman’s 
journalism—a vast, often neglected, but tremendously rich collection 
of writings that span the length of his career. We eventually plan to 
apply these methods to all of Whitman’s journalistic material, incor-
porating our findings into the encoding as well as the editorial notes 
that accompany each piece. Ultimately, we hope that our approach 
can serve as a model for attribution work on other writers and lend 
some certainty to the long tradition of author attribution.
KEVIN MCMULLEN University of Nebraska-Lincoln
STEFAN SCHÖBERLEIN  Marshall University
JASON STACY Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville
NOTES
1  Maciej Eder, Mike Kestemont, and Jan Rybicki, “Stylometry with R: a Suite 
of Tools,” Digital Humanities 2013: Conference Abstracts, University of Nebraska-
Lincoln, Lincoln (2013), 487- 489.
2  For an overview, see Efstathios Stamatatos, “A survey of modern authorship 
attribution methods,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and 
Technology 60 (2009), 538-556. 
3  Walt Whitman, The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, vol. 
III 1848-1858, Douglas Noverr, Jason Stacy, Zachary Turpin, eds, (New York: 
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Peter Lang, forthcoming). Stefan Schöberlein analyzed the corpus of Brooklyn 
Daily Times editorials between 1857 and 1858 for this project and described his 
methods in the introduction.
4  For a proof-of-concept assessment of the particular approach used here, see 
Stefan Schöberlein, “Poe or Not Poe? A Stylometric Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s 
Disputed Writings,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 73 (2017), 644-646.
5  The authors would like to thank Stephanie M. Blalock for information on po-
tential plagiarism in “Manly Health.”
6  The comparison pool is an updated comparison corpus, based on the authorial 
corpora employed in the Poe-assessment cited in the previous note. It consists of 
authorial corpora by Mark Twain, Nathaniel B. Tucker, Thomas Dunn English, 
Edward V. Sparhawk, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel P. Willis, Henry B, Hirst, 
Horace Greeley, Robert Greenhow, Margaret Fuller, Thomas R. Dew, Thomas 
Carlyle, N. C. Brooks, and Horace B. Wallace. The smallest authorial corpus is 
Sparhawk’s—with 164kb of data. 
7  February 28-April 23, 1842. Whitman was announced as editor of the Aurora
on March 28, 1842; his tenure as editor likely ended in late April. 
8  See Joann P. Krieg, Whitman and the Irish, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 
2000), 38-45; David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, 
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 99-101;  Jason Stacy, Walt Whitman’s 
Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman’s Journalism and the First Edition 
of Leaves of Grass, 1840-1855 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 59-67.
9  The editorials included in the group of nativist pieces were: “Sectarianism and 
Our Public Schools” (03/07/1842); “The Schools” (03/10/1842); “The Schools” 
(03/15/1842); “Insult to American Citizenship!” (03/17/1842); “The Aurora and 
the School Question” (03/18/1842); “Public Schools” (03/21/1842); “Americanism” 
(03/23/1842); “Tammany in Trouble” (03/24/1842); “Tammany’s ‘Family Jars’” 
(03/26/1842); “Organs of the Democracy” (03/29/1842); “The School Bill” 
(03/29/1842); “Defining ‘Our Position’” (03/30/1842); “Dissensions of Tammany” 
(04/01/1842); “Tammany Meeting Last Night” (04/06/1842); “The Mask Thrown 
Off” (04/07/1842); “The School Bill” (04/08/1842); [“On Saturday night”] 
(04/11/1842); [“It is a fearful thing”] (04/12/1842); ) “More Catholic Insolence!” 
(04/12/1842); “Result of the Election” (04/13/1842); “Incidents of Last Night” 
(04/13/1842); [“According to the best authenticated”] (04/14/1842); “Plots of the 
Jesuits!” (04/14/1842);  “The Late Riots” (04/15/1842); “Where Will Tammany 
Have to Stop?” (04/15/1842); “The Catholic Rows Not Ended” (04/16/1842); [“The 
Aurora has been roaring”] (04/18/1842).
10 Essentially, the method used here only identifies a “most likely candidate” but 
does not show us how likely said candidate is. There is, thus, a risk that, depending 
on the measure used to identify this candidate, the classify function might pick a 
wrong one. Varying these measures allows us to spot such cases. Metaphorically 
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115
speaking, we have a fruit basket and a banana and we are trying to figure out, 
which fruit in the basket is most similar to the banana: if there is an actual banana 
in the basket our method should identify it no matter how this “similarity” is cal-
culated—but in the absence of banana in the basket, different ways to calculate 
“similarity” should not result in a consensus candidate (resulting in something 
like: 40% apple, 60% raspberry for one method; 100% grapefruit for another; 20% 
apple, 80% grapefruit for a third, for example. If all three methods were to come 
back with 51% to 100% apple, this approach would be invalid).
11 Reynolds, 99. Jason Stacy likewise argues that in this case Whitman was a 
“single issue” nativist, and that his anti-immigrant sentiments were a reflection of 
a broader contemporary concern over the perceived threat of the Catholic Church’s 
influence over American institutions, in this case, the quasi-public Public School 
Society of New York City, Stacy, 61.
12 Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1999), 62-63.
13 Krieg, 44. 
14 “Sectarianism and Our Public Schools,” New York Aurora, 3/7/1842, Bergman, 
et al., The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, vol. I 1834-1846, 
(New York: Peter Lang), 43.


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Jean Huets. With Walt Whitman: Himself in the Nineteenth Century, in America.

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 36, no. 2/3

Starry Nights: Whitman, Epilepsy, and Van Gogh

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Fall 2018/Winter 2019

Walt Whitman at the Aurora: A Model for Journalistic Attribution

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