Can data science be applied to establishing the author of a text?
Yes - this is an active area of study, especially famously with respect to disputed plays of Shakespeare. Features commonly extracted include frequency of key words, novel vocabularly, word length, and these are well adapted to being used as data mining features.

For example, here is a thesis that data mined Shakespeare's extant plays to test whether they could have been the work of a number of authors often touted as being the "true Shakespeare" -> http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~datamining/Final.pdf