News

This week, the Hub travelled to Brisbane for the SocioPhonAus3 conference, held on July 11 and 12. This was hosted by Griffith University, at the Ship Inn on Southbank. A very nice venue, as you can see from our feature image. The small picture below also shows where we had our breaks and meals – […]

In the last month (June 8 and 9, 2022), the Hub ran a symposium called Transcription in Legal Contexts: Problems and Solutions. Day 1 was all about problems, while Day 2 was about solutions. We ran this event on campus at The University of Melbourne, and also had online attendees including many from the U.K […]

As of today, the Hub has a new open access publication – this is an article published in our special issue of Frontiers in Communication, called Does Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Have a Role in the Transcription of Indistinct Covert Recordings for Forensic Purposes?     Motivation for this study This study was motivated by […]

The Hub has had a busy month, with Helen coming to Melbourne (for the first time in two years!). We had some work to do together on a research project (which we will report on soon) and Helen gave two lectures about forensic linguistics in the first year Language course. The first lecture focused on […]

In one of our first posts last year, we mentioned we would be co-editing a Frontiers research topic (see that post from March 2021 here). The research topic is called  Capturing Talk: The Institutional Practices Surrounding the Transcription of Spoken Language. For our first post of 2022, We are pleased to announce there are already […]

The Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence will be presenting our work at the upcoming 2021 Australian Linguistic Society annual conference (ALS). This is going to be fully online, hosted by La Trobe University Melbourne, and will run from Dec 7-Dec 9. Our papers on forensic linguistic topics are (times listed in AEDT): Tuesday […]

I recently spoke at a panel session for Linguistics in the Pub with my friends (who are also colleagues) Chloé Diskin-Holdaway and Olga Maxwell (pictured above). The three of us as a team have published some research about Indian English and about Australian English (Chloé and Debbie, with Penelope Schmidt). Details of the Linguistics in […]

Helen and I recently published an article called Acoustic injustice: The experience of listening to indistinct covert recordings presented as evidence in court. The reason for the title is that the paper appears in The Acoustics of Justice: Law, Listening, Sound, a special issue of the journal Law, Text, Culture edited by James Parker, Sara Ramshaw and […]

The Hub had four presentations at the recent virtual IAFPA (International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics) conference – you can read a general summary about that conference in another blog post here. This current post is all about research carried out by Dr. Yuko Kinoshita from the Australian National University, in collaboration with Helen […]

In the Hub, we find that we are very often asked about how the problem of what is said in indistinct covert recordings can be solved using computational methods. In our new research we show that the way things currently stand, computational methods are not suitable for a range of reasons – transcription by humans […]

The Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence took part (virtually) in a conference run by The International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics. It was hosted by the Phonetics team at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany), from August 23-August 25, 2021. Our feature image is of Marburg, where the conference was hosted; image is from the […]

This is a post by Conor Clements who did his Honours thesis with me (Debbie Loakes) last year. Over the course of 2020, I ran an experiment for my honours thesis on the topics of forensic transcription and the effects of priming and enhancing on perception of indistinct audio. My experiment followed on from an […]

On Wednesday April 28 2021, I led a discussion at Naughton’s, a lovely old “pub” opposite The University of Melbourne on Royal Parade. This was a Linguistics in the Pub event. Impressively, Linguistics in the Pub has been running for 10 years now. You can read about Linguistics in the Pub here (and you can […]

The Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence recently took part in the Perspectives on Transcription in Criminal Justice symposium, which was held online on Thursday March 11. The event was run by the SILC team (Centre for Spoken Interaction in Legal Contexts) within the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics. Around 130 people logged in […]

How I became interested in Forensic Linguistics and Forensic Phonetics I studied my undergraduate degree in Linguistics at Monash University. I remember looking at the handbook (which was a huge printed document in those days!) and wanting to know more about forensic linguistics – curiosity about this subject is what got me into studying linguistics […]