Veiled Authorship: Can Pen-Named Op-Eds Have a Stylometric Signature that Survives Editorship

AlNagheya, Marwa Hassan Mohammed

doi:10.21608/jwadi.2025.401441.1221

Veiled Authorship: Can Pen-Named Op-Eds Have a Stylometric Signature that Survives Editorship

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

Marwa Hassan Mohammed AlNagheya

Assistant Lecturer, Department of English, Port Said University

10.21608/jwadi.2025.401441.1221

المستخلص

In the age of the Internet and social media, where many writers hide behind their blue screens, broadcasting all kinds of ideas and committing new types of crimes through steering public opinion sheltered with the courage of impunity, the ability to use linguistic tools as evidence of either guilt or innocence becomes of utmost importance. The present study is set to investigate the potential linguistic potency of unmasking the hidden identity of prominent authors whose ideas get the chance to be published opposite the editorial page in leading national newspaper in Egypt under a pseudonym. Pseudonymous op-eds authorship is expected to be the most hidden among other genres of writing. This is because the text is expected, as a rule of thumb, to be reviewed and proofread by the publisher and editorial board before getting to appear in a newspaper. The study at hand centers around the hypothesis that there must be linguistic features that survive the alterations made to the text that can still lead to the real hand holding the pen behind the post-editorial pen-named column. The study employs a corpus-based approach to analyzing stylometric features in an article published in Al-Masry Al-Youm Newspaper's column وجدتها wajadtoha [Eureka] that is regularly signed Newton for the end goal of getting its authorship verified. A contrastive analysis was conducted against ArabiCorpus — an online corpus of Brigham Young University (BYU). Using the stylometric features detected in the pen-named op-ed as ruling criteria, the finding revealed a notable variance from the way they exhibit on the sub corpus [all newspaper] of the online ArabiCorpus revealing distinctiveness. The analysis presented in this paper forms the first stage of any possible authorship dispute be it verification or attribution through the creation of a forensic linguistic profile of the disputed text. This way it is expected to contribute to the field of forensic linguistics by demonstrating the efficacy of stylometric tools in resolving authorship disputes in two challenging scopes: the genre of writing like op-eds and the less researched Arabic language.

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