Perhaps the most interesting presentation I saw at NJCEA was Glenn Steinberg’s on Chaucer, Linguistics, and Parentage. A lot of very interesting data mining in this presentation.

Chaucer doesn’t stylistically deviate from his peers.
There were some interesting handouts about The Book of The Dutchess and Daphnaida.
Handout compares number of word uses between Spender, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate.
I would love to see wordles of these. That might make for an interesting student project. Maybe each wiki page needs a wordle.
Spenser has more phrases in common with Lydgate than Chaucer, but could be because of evolving language.
Spenser’s claim that Chaucer highly influenced him greatly exaggerated.