The individual styles of hundreds of people's text messages will be analyzed in a study that aims to help police with criminal investigations.
Analysis of texts proved crucial in convicting Stuart Campbell of the murder of Danielle Jones in 2002. The 15-year-old Essex schoolgirl disappeared in June 2001. Following a police investigation, her uncle Stuart Campbell was put on trial for her abduction and murder.
The six-month University of Leicester study aims to develop a forensic toolkit for investigations involving texts. It will analyze the linguistic conventions of texters.
Forensic authorship analysis, as the technique is known, is already used extensively for written documents like letters and emails. It is often used to analyze abusive or threatening emails or in cases of copyright infringement. It has not been widely used to study text messages.
The team also hopes to identify patterns that give clues to the age and gender of the author.
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