Book announcement: Forensic Document Examination in the 21st Century

FDE in the 21st CenturyI 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, Elaine X. Wooton, Donna O. Eisenberg, Thomas W. Vastrick, Marie E. Durina, Kathleen Annunziata Nicolaides, Khody R. Detwiler, Tobin Tanaka, Larry A. Olson, Zain M. Bhaloo, Peter Tytell, Timothy A. Campbell, and Mark T. Goff.  
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Book announcement: Forensic Examination of Signatures

Forensic Examination of Signatures CoverI was pleased be a co-contributor for Dr. Linton A. Mohammed’s latest textbook, Forensic Examination of Signatures.  Other contributors, along with Dr. Mohammed, were Lloyd Cunningham, William Flynn, and Kathleen Nicolaides, with the Foreword by the esteemed Professor David Kaye.  The text was published June 6, 2019 by Elsevier’s Academic Press (ISBN:  978-0-12-813029-2, https://doi.org/10.1016/C2016-0-04445-5).

The book focuses on the forensic examination and evaluation of signatures which is one of the most difficult areas of Forensic Document Examination.  My contribution was Chapter 11 entitled “Conclusions, Reporting and Testimony”, co-written with Dr. Mohammed.
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R script for viewing Topaz digital signature files

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.