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+Attributing inscriptions to masons on the basis of their style is
+useful for dating and reconstructing texts. A team of computer
+scientists, in collaboration with the epigrapher Stephen Tracy, has
+developed digital methods to quantify letter shapes, which can then be
+compared statistically across texts to determine likely
+authorship. Promisingly, the results have so far agreed entirely with
+Tracy’s own attributions. Digital stylometry, however, must not be
+fetishized as a fountain of “essentially more objective,” “hard
+evidence” or of “correct and unambiguous” facts (Papaodysseus et
+al. 2007: 749; Tracy and Papaodysseus 2009: 101; Panagopoulos et
+al. 2009: 1404; also see Tracy 2003: xviii). Computerization does
+eliminate the inconsistencies of human perception and enable great
+precision, but any promises of scientific objectivity should be
+scrutinized. This paper attempts to provide such scrutiny by advancing
+three sets of claims. First, epigraphy possesses a troubled history
+with supposedly objective criteria: the now-discredited
+three-bar-sigma dating rule, for example, held the field in thrall for
+much of the twentieth centurybefore being disproved (Chambers et
+al. 1990); the episode’s clear moral is that we should be skeptical
+about other, similar claims to objectivity. Second, comparison with
+the connoisseurship of Athenian pottery underscores the relative
+poverty of epigraphical connoisseurship: Tracy is the only recent
+Hellenist to devote sustained effort to identifying epigraphic hands,
+resulting, inter alia, in no robust scholarly consensus on the
+criteria or standards of judgment. Finally—and most important—major
+epistemological issues simply remain unconsidered. Essentially,
+Tracy’s method has been refined into a set of algorithms. But the fact
+that analysis takes place in a computer does not guarantee that the
+method is correct, nor does it make its results “objective” in any
+deep sense. The method and its calibration remain exercises in human
+judgment, grounded ultimately in our visual experiences. Digital
+imaging calls for reinvigorated, updated engagement with conceptions
+of style and connoisseurship, not their repression.