Resources for Forensic Linguistics

Forensic linguistics is a branch of linguistics that is concerned with (mostly) criminal investigations and the use of linguistic analysis in this process. For example, a very simple task of a forensic linguist could be to analyse the linguistic content of a threat message and try to find out the writer of this text. A linguist who is trained in text analysis and stylistics will find themselves equipped with such tools that would be helpful in this analysis. Today, corpus linguistics is heavily used in text analysis for forensic linguistics. Moreover, forensic linguistics is not just about investigating threat messages or suicide notes, there are many more opportunities with the new mediums of communication on the internet, e.g. the analysis of social media texts for deception, fake news, disinformation, and trolling.

I have come to know some people and resources in last few years in this area. Following them on social media (Twitter) will be helpful for the reader to widen their horizons and/or get more information about forensic linguistic methods.

• Dr Claire Hardaker (she also runs a podcast on forensic linguistics which is very informative, and she is the director of FORGE: Forensic Linguistics RG, University of Lancaster).
• William Dance is doing PhD in online fake news.
• Isobelle Clarke is a corpus linguist who has worked on Trump's tweets.
• Maciej Eder is a stylistician and digital humanist. He has written an R package called Stylo which is helpful in text analysis, e.g. authorship attribution.

As far as books related to forensic linguistics are concerned, a simple Google search with 'forensic linguistics' can return many titles including introductory books and handbooks about forensic linguistics. PDFs for many books can be found on Library Genesis (search on Google or use DuckDuckGo Search Engine that is a bit more merciful in searching such websites).