A Stylometric Profile of Carmen Mola in the Gender of “Her” Authorial Persona and the Contribution of Each Author Behind the Pseudonym

Spanish authors Agustîn Martínez, Jorge Díaz Cortés, and Antonio Santos Mercero are the men behind the female collective pseudonym Carmen Mola, an award-winning feminist author. Mola was previously thought to be one female until the three men revealed themselves. Could stylometry have detected this? Furthermore, what was the contribution of each of the co-authors? Using a series of independent methodologies for stylometric analysis, such as PCA and rolling SVM with Stylo, and weighted voting with JGAAP, we found that the authors behind Mola do not successfully present a female authorial persona. Further analyses of the authors behind this pseudonym show the differences in their material contribution: Santos Mercero seems to have contributed the most text to two of the books and Díaz Cortés for the other two. This, however, does not necessarily imply that Martínez did not contribute materially. The key here is that this provides an interesting case study for a discussion of what stylometry means in a case of co-authorship, as not all co-authorship is material. The independent analyses are largely in harmony in their evaluation of the individual author’s material contribution toward the works published under the name of Carmen Mola.