Comparative network analysis as a new approach to the editorship profiling task: A case study of the Mishnah and Tosefta from Rabbinic literature Avital Zadok 1 , Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet 1, *, Jonathan Schler 2 , Binyamin Katzoff 1 1 Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel 2 Holon Institute of Technology, Israel *Correspondence: Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet. Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. E-mail: Maayan.Zhitomirsky-Geffet@biu.ac.il Abstract Social network analysis of characters in historical works is a popular research methodology in the study of historical literature. This article proposes using this methodology to characterize and comparatively analyze editing styles of similar historical literary works to determine whether they were edited by the same hand. To that end, the study proposes constructing a network of char- acters for each of the works being studied and to compute standard statistical measures for these networks, thus producing a network-based profile for the editing style of each work, which can be compared to the profiles of various other works. To deter- mine the effectiveness of this new approach, it was tested on two similar works from the realm of Rabbinic literature—the Mishnah and the Tosefta. Our findings show that despite the abundant structural, thematic, and linguistic similarities of the works, their network-based profiles demonstrated clear differences between them with respect to various parameters, like the degree of connectivity, density, and centrality of the networks and their communities, and also with respect to the usage of different types of relationships in each network. These differences are reflected in the network features of the works, rather than in their texts, and so it would be difficult to identify them using direct stylometric analysis on the texts of the works, especially given the stylistic and thematic similarity between them. The approach presented in this article forms a basis for developing automatic classifiers to identify different editors and editing styles based on works’ network-based profiles. 1 Introduction The construction and analysis of social networks for historical figures have become a popular approach in history and prosopography (Keats-Rohan, 2007), soci- ology (Wetherell, 1998; Rolda ´ n Vera and Schupp, 2006), and digital humanities (Rochat, 2015; Yamada, 2015). Research on social network prosopography is based on mapping the interactions of groups of people in graphs that represent individuals (nodes) and their relationships (edges). This yields insight about the structure of social connections and the impact of these social connections on a group, such as in decisions, ac- tivities, and behavior (Novak et al., 2014). The social network helps identify the key characters, based on the number and density of connections (Keats-Rohan, 2007; Rochat, 2015; Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Bratspiess, 2015). It is also possible to identify commu- nities in the social network and determine their size, density, and connectivity (Blondel et al., 2008). The ad- vantage of this approach is that it provides a global perspective and automatic computational analysis for large historical corpora and allows scholars to answer new research questions and identify new trends and phenomena that could not have been discovered by thorough manual research. In the field of stylometry, the standard practice is to construct a lexical profile of texts in order to compare them stylistically and thus to determine whether they were written by the same author, by authors with simi- lar demographic characteristics, and/or during the same period of time (Koppel et al., 2009; Tamboli and Prasad, 2019). However, to the best of our knowledge, the question of identifying an editor or a redaction style of the historical works has not yet been studied in depth in the literature. The methods for identifying and characterizing an author are generally based on V C The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2023, 00, 1–20 https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqad038 Full Paper Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqad038/7197413 by Haifa University user on 18 June 2023