The 79th Annual General Meeting of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners (ASQDE, Inc) was held August 10th to 12th, 2021. It was again conducted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The theme for this year’s meeting was “ASQDE_AGM 2.0 ver. 2021 – The Future is Now”.
I am very pleased to have been contributor to a new textbook, Forensic Document Examination in the 21st Century. The text was edited by Jan Seaman Kelly and Miriam Angel and will be published by CRC Press.
My personal contribution is chapter 3 entitled “The Logical Approach to Evidence Evaluation”. The complete list of contributors is impressive and includes Jan Seaman Kelly, Miriam Angel, Brett M.D. Bishop, Rigo Vargas, Mara L. Merlino, Samiah Ibrahim, Lucinda Risi, Lisa M. Hanson, Carolyne Bird, Linda L. Mitchell,
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The 78th Annual General Meeting of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners (ASQDE, Inc) was held August 10th through 14th, 2020. It was a new type of meeting necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting was originally planned to be held in Frankenmuth, Michigan but a (very wise) decision was made to hold an entirely virtual meeting instead. The theme for this year was “Future-Proofing Questioned Documents”.
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Every ASQDE meeting is worth attending. They are great fun with lots of useful and interesting content. Unfortunately, I could not make it to the 2016 ASQDE conference held in Pensacola, Florida. Nonetheless I managed to participate, albeit via Skype.
One of the activities at the conference was a panel discussion discussing “Approaches to Evaluation and Reporting of Expert Evidence” and I was invited to participant with three other people. It was a very interesting session…
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What is certification? In my opinion, professional certification is a designation that indicates the holder of the certification has appropriate and adequate qualifications to do some particular, generally well-defined, job or task. As an example I am a forensic document examiner and I have received professional certification from the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, Inc.
An internet search for ‘certification’ produces a huge list of possibilities, with more such programs being developed all the time as people become attuned to issues of quality and competency. Indeed, almost every profession has some type of certification and a few have several (consider all of the ‘certifications’ in the computing industry). Most, if not all, certification programs are aimed at improving the quality in a given profession by setting minimum standards for the job. The basic idea is that someone meeting or exceeding those standards will produce quality output on the job. Certification programs are generally created or are administered by a professional society, a college or university, or some private body set up expressly for that purpose.
Forensic Document Examination is no exception so it may be worthwhile discussing certification options as well as the pros and cons that I see for those options.
Read moreThe 2014 ASQDE–ASFDE conference included an interesting panel discussion with the title “Conclusions… Signature and Handwriting Conclusion Terminology and Scales”. I was fortunate to be able to take part, albeit only remotely via Skype.
The abstract for the session was as follows:
A current and global issue in our field is the topic of conclusion terminology and conclusion scales, particularly in respect of signature and handwriting conclusions. It is an important yet difficult topic to address because, while there is some commonality in the conclusion scales used in different geographical regions around the world, within a number of geographical regions there are multiple scales in use. It is for this very reason that it is also a topic in great need of discussion and there is a strong argument that we should attempt to reach a consensus (even if the result is that we agree to disagree).
This panel discussion is a collaboration of insights from numerous colleagues in our field in person, via Skype and in writing from private and government laboratories in geographical regions across the Americas, Australia, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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During the 2013 ASQDE conference I had the pleasure to participate in a workshop by Bill Flynn and Kathleen Nicolaides entitled “Forensic Examination of Digital Signatures”.1 The workshop covered various topics but one part of it involved the production of visual graphs representing digital signature data which was done using a spreadsheet program (MS Excel). A spreadsheet works well for many things but, for this purpose, it was both tedious and unnecessary.
I decided to take a few minutes to write a semi-automated routine that would run in “R”, free open-source software that does this sort of thing very well. Please note that the routine has not been updated since it was first written in 2013, however it should still work for Topaz data (.sig) files.
The routine is available, with some restrictions and caveats, to qualified forensic document examiners and interested researchers / academics. If you would like to get a copy of it, please contact me using the form shown below. Please include enough bio information for me to assess your request and I will get back to you.
This year the Annual General Meeting of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners (ASQDE) 
is being held in Indianapolis, Indiana on August 24 through 29, 2013. In keeping with the theme, “Demonstrative Science: Illustrating Findings in Reports and Court Testimony”, I will be presenting a one-day workshop entitled “Conclusion Scales and Logical Inference” on Sunday, August 25.
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