How the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) algorithm works

This essay will describe the algorithm underlying a new method of computational authorship attribution, the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method, and introduce an Open Source implementation of this algorithm as a Python script freely available for any investigator to experiment with. A mathematically rigorous description of the WAN method and accounts of its application to various problems in authorship attribution have been provided in a series of previous publications (Segarra, Eisen & Ribeiro 2015; Segarra et al. 2016; Eisen et al. 2018), and the specific purpose here is to offer a relatively non-technical account of the underlying algorithm in order to help dispel misconceptions about it and encourage its use by other investigators.