Event Date: Monday, 11 July, 2022
Location: 11:00-13:00, Teams:https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YzAxMDQ4ZDEtODY2Ny00ZjNiLWI4NTgtYTY0ZWM2YmE3ODVh%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c7456b31-a220-47f5-be52-473828670aa1%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22443d4793-d453-4744-9862-1db273b59c4d%22%7d
Speaker: Dr. Lucia Busso & Prof. Tim Grant (Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics)
Title: The FOrensic Linguistic Databank: the challenge of open science in Forensic Linguistics
Abstract: The talk presents an innovative online resource for sharing and accessing forensic linguistics data, the Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD), developed in the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL) at Aston University, Birmingham. FoLD is a permanent, controlled access online repository for forensic linguistic data, including malicious communication data, investigative interview data, hate speech, and legal language. Since access to relevant forensic linguistic data has been notoriously challenging since the conception of the discipline in the 1960s, FoLD represents the first attempt to provide researchers with the opportunity of sharing datasets of different levels of sensitivity and ethical concern. In this talk we present the FoLD repository, how to donate data, and how to access already existing datasets from the website. We further showcase two case studies carried out by researchers in the FoLD research centre at AIFL using data from FoLD: the Operation Heron corpus and the Excrow corpus.
Lucia Busso is a Research Associate at AIFL since 2019 and obtained her PhD at the University of Pisa under the supervision of Professor Alessandro Lenci and Dr. Florent Perek (University of Birmingham). Her research interests lie at the intersection of cognitive, corpus, and forensic linguistics.
Tim Grant is the director and co-founding member of AIFL and full professor of Linguistics at Aston University. He is one of the world’s most experienced forensic linguistic practitioner and researcher, and has published extensively across forensic linguistics, working on authorship attribution, police interviews, threatening communication, and the pragmatics of non-verbal consent in rape cases. His new book “The idea of progress in authorship analysis” has just been published by Cambridge University press.