β Scribed by T.R. Davis
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
A descriptive account is given of research into some areas of the forensic analysis of handwriting being conducted at Birmingham University.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the work being done in the English Department at Birmingham on forensic handwriting analysis. This immediately demands the question: why an English Department for research into Forensic Science ?
Essentially there ale two answers. One is that there is in the English Department a (unique, I think) three-year optional course for undergraduates entitled "Bibliography and Paleography". This deals with written and printed texts as physical objects, and includes the study of printing and printing history, papermaking, typography-and handwriting. The subject has mainly been developed to try and work out (for instance) what it was that Shakespeare actually wrote, when he wrote Hamlet, given that the two best texts that we have, of 160415 and 1623, differ from each other in well over 1500 places. The study of handwriting is clearly relevant to this pursuit: its usefulness is brought into sharp focus by the fact that in 1970 Sotheby's auctioned two seventeenthcentury manuscripts, each containing a single poem by John Donne; one went for L650, the other for over L25,000. This was solely because of a handwriting identification that said that Donne himself copied one and not the other poem.
Thus Bibliography and Document Analysis pursue precisely similar and parallel paths, which, in my case, have converged: since 1974 I have used my training as a bibliographer for work in the field of forensic handwriting, on a consultancy basis. I have used this experience in my teaching, a third of which is now on the subject of handwriting, in my own research, and in that of others that I have been able to supervise or provide a home for.
The other reason is that I work in a Department of English Language and Literature. Linguistics is a science, perhaps the most successful, in fact, of the human sciences; and Bibliography-or, for that matter, Forensic Document Analysis-concern themselves with written language, and could indeed quite reasonably, by a shift of perspective, be considered-like the forensic applications of acoustic phonetics-as a branch of linguistics. I am constantly in debt to my colleagues who do research in English language for criticism, insight and support.
There is an additional reason why Birmingham University is a good place in which to study handwriting. Literally just down the road is the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory. Hardly any of the research I am about to describe would exist, at least in its present form, without the advice-and criticism-of scientists in the Document Laboratory, particularly its Head, Dr RN Totty.
I shall now give a bare outline of the work that is going on in Birmingham.
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