New Forensic Linguistic Blog Launched

Online, September 9, 2009 (Newswire.com) - Georgetown, DE September 8, 2009 Today, the blogosphere welcomes its newest member with the launch of Telling TALE (http://www.telliingtale.info ), a new blog that will present and debate ideas for the future of linguistic evidence and forensic linguistic research, advances and methods for investigations and in the courtroom. Linguistic evidence includes authorship identification, threat assessment, suicide note assessment, non-native speaker assessment -any kind of question about documentary evidence which requires language-based analysis.

Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a call to action with recommendations for validation and testing of many crime-lab techniques, including fingerprints, handwriting examination and digital forensics. But the NAS report did not cover emerging forensic sciences such as forensic linguistic evidence processing.

"The Telling TALE blog invites dialogue around what the future holds for forensic linguistics and document examination, as well as other emerging forensic sciences" said Carole Chaski Ph.D, executive director of TALE. "Although thorough cross-examination in Daubert and Frye hearings can weed out a lot of junk, or severely restrict it, as happened in the Melanie McGuire trial a few years ago, we need strong voices to speak out against junk science and its practitioners. The Telling TALE blog will provide a space where all of us who want a solid future for forensic linguistic document examination in investigations and courtrooms can - together - explore what that future should look like. My colleagues and I have become increasingly concerned that what sometimes passes as forensic linguistics in courts and universities neither follows general principles of forensic sciences nor standard theories of linguistics."

TALE's sponsorship of the Telling TALE blog will invite the ideas and perspectives of guest authors and comments from forensic linguistic experts along with law enforcement and private investigators, researchers and technology vendors, and the legal community.

The Telling TALE blog launches with a provocative response from Dr. Chaski regarding potential loopholes found in the NAS report: (1) need for judicial training on how to recognize junk science; (2) self-legitimatizing and unscrupulous academics who do forensics on the side, without the academic research to back up unreliable methods; and (3) self-certification programs which plague unreliable forensic techniques.

About The Association for Linguistic Evidence
The Association for Linguistic Evidence (TALE) was founded in 2009, by Carole E. Chaski, PhD a long recognized authority in the science of forensic linguistics with several colleagues from law enforcement, data aggregation technology and the legal community. TALE encourages the development and testing of methods for handling linguistic evidence, independent of any litigation, hosts webinars on linguistic evidence, and publishes an annual review covering new developments in legal rulings and linguistic methods.

Media contact
Carole Chaski, PhD
Telephone: +1-302-856-9488
Email: [email protected]