Forensic Authorship Analysis and the World Wide Web

Implementing a novel method for identifying idiolectal co-selections, and taking the UNABOM investigation as a case study, this Pivot evaluates the effectiveness and reliability of using the web for forensic purposes. Increasingly, forensic linguists are using the web as a tool in forensic authorship analysis cases. Perhaps the most notable example is the American trial of the Unabomber, in which the web was searched for idiolectal co-selections, and claims made about their distinctiveness based on the number of search results.

Two experiments are described in which the web is used to attribute documents to their authors, both when texts produced by candidate authors are, and are not, available for comparison. With significant variation found in the results, this book argues more caution is required in using the web as a corpus.