Forensic Linguistics and History Symposium

ABSTRACTS:

Runaways, Rebels, Wenches and Rogues: Searching for History’s Most Wanted

Dr. Joseph Yanninelli

Newspaper advertisements for fugitives were a common feature of slave labour regimes around the world. For historians, these documents are both indispensable and deeply problematic. Rich in detail and loaded with data, each advertisement provides a biographical snapshot of their subjects frozen in space and time. Aided by digital databases, artificial intelligence and other technologies, it has become increasingly easy to discover, collect and investigate this material. Where do runaway advertisements appear, and how are they used? What information do they reveal or conceal about the individuals involved? How can they help us understand the relationship between resistance, surveillance, crime and policing?

A forensic linguistic analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters

Dr. Andrea Nini

In the autumn of 1888 London was shocked by a series of murders that would be remembered for over a century. The perpetrator of these murders, known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’, was never caught, leading to numerous theories about their identity. At the time of the investigations and up until years later, more than 200 letters signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ were received across the UK. Historians agree that most if not all of these letters were certainly written by hoaxers. Among the very first letters of this kind, two of them were key in creating the ‘Jack the Ripper’ legend and historians today believe that these were fabricated by journalists to boost newspaper sales. This talk presents results of an authorship analysis of these letters aimed at identifying which were written by the same person. The analysis focuses on lexicogrammatical constructions that characterise the idiolect of ‘Jack the Ripper’. In addition to constituting new evidence in the case, these findings also lead to intriguing implications for the nature of idiolect and for modern Cognitive and Forensic Linguistics

What a (Roman) poet tells us without words

Dr. Benjamin Nagy

A poem is made of words, but it is not the words that make it a poem. In every kind of
poetry, aesthetic considerations constrain the poet's choices: whether metre, rhyme, syllable count, alliterative structure, or simply 'poetic diction'. My research is on quantitative analysis of classical Latin verse, focused on the 'poetic' features; a tradition that goes back to the time of the poets themselves, but has continued uninterrupted in Latin philology to the present day. More recently, this scholarship has taken a digital turn, enabling exciting new examinations of old questions. In this presentation I will explain the kinds of things that can be computationally analysed, the kinds of things that cannot, and some of the applications of these techniques.
As a motivating example, I will use my recent research using metrical analysis to re-examine the authorship of the (pseudo-)Ovidian poem Nux or De Nuce which has been argued to be both genuine and imitatio by different scholars at different points in history. The analysis of the complex poetics shows clearly (which the words do not) that the poem is genuinely Ovidian, and should be restored to his canon.