FORENSIC LINGUISTICS

For forensic linguistic data and resources, please visit my newly created page ForensicLing.com, updated and managed in collaboration with my colleague, Dakota Wing.

I became passionate about working with and researching language related to legal and forensic issues in 2001 while working as a Managing Editor at a small Southwest publishing company. There, I became the first line of response to potential issues related to copyright violations. While I had long wanted to pursue my PhD in linguistics, this experience sparked my decision in 2005 to return to graduate school at the University of California, Davis, in order to fulfill this goal.

During my educational experiences, I was able to acquire a variety of invaluable corpus and discourse analytic methods from some of the leading scholars in their fields. However, what was imminently missing was access to data in closed genres – those that are most important for research in legal and forensic contexts such as police interrogations, confession statements, and threatening communications, to name just a few.

ForensicLing.com is an effort to make such hard sought, but publicly available data accessible in one place. For example, for those seeking to perform a qualitative conversation analysis on a police interview with a witness, you will find links to such public data on the Individual Data page. For those wishing to perform a quantitative corpus analysis of threatening communications, you will find links to collections of such data on the Data Collections page. (Note that some collections are public and corpus-ready; some are public and need corpus preparation of the data; and some are private and need permission to access).

I welcome additional contributions of data via the submission form on ForensicLing.com. (As of now, the data are primarily from North America and in American English. We hope to expand this in the future.) I thank you, as researchers of legal and forensic contexts, for your contributions and for your dedication to furthering the scientific inquiry, transparency, and replicability of forensic linguistic research!