Projet Bertillon has recently launched. Coordinated by IdentiNet participants Ilsen About and Pierre Piazza, and hosted by Criminocorpus, this valuable online resource offers a comprehensive overview of the life and work of Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), a pioneer of forensic identification methods at the Paris Prefecture de Police whose criminological expertise ranged from mug shots, anthropometry, and dactyloscopy through file management and the analysis of crime scenes. The site, which is available in both English and French, contains innovative online galleries of Bertillon-related imagery as well as academic resources such as biographies, bibliographies, and links, and is also inviting the submission of new articles on Bertillon for online publication in 2011. For further information, please visit Projet Bertillon.
Posts Tagged 'Forensics'
Projet Bertillon Launches
Published April 14, 2010 Calls for Papers , Member Activities , Projects and Centres , Websites Leave a CommentTags: Bertillon, Biometrics, Crime, Fingerprinting, Forensics, France, Nineteenth Century, Photography, Policing, Profiling
Workshop: Legal Medicine and Expertise in History
Published November 13, 2009 Conferences Leave a CommentTags: Crime, Fingerprinting, Forensics, Legal Frameworks, Medicine, Policing
A one-day workshop to be held at Oxford Brookes University on Friday 4 December 2009 will explore ‘Legal Medicine and Expertise in History’. According to the organizers, ‘[T]he workshop is designed to facilitate intellectual exchange and debate between academics working on the history of forensic medicine, by bringing together scholars who study the subject in a variety of national contexts and across a broad period of time. It will engage with two central themes: the character and role of forensic medicine in Europe since the medieval period; and the relationship between medicine, the law and wider society as illuminated by the notion of ‘expertise’’. It promises to be rich in identification angles; for further details, including speaker information, full programme and abstracts, see the workshop webpage. Picture: Flickr (CC)
New Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition
Published July 30, 2009 Publications Leave a CommentTags: Biometrics, Fingerprinting, Forensics, Policing
Posted by Massimiliano Pagani. A new version of the Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition was published in May 2009. The authors announce that this is not a mere new edition. The 2009 book is a major update that describes the most recent advances in fingerprinting, represented by over 500 papers on fingerprint recognition published between 2003 and 2008. The DVD included with the book also contains the databases used in the 2004 Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC 2004). For full details and ordering information see the Springer website. Picture: stock.xchng
Paper: Police and Identification in France
Published April 11, 2009 Papers Leave a CommentTags: Biometrics, Crime, Eighteenth Century, Europe, Forensics, France, Policing, Registration
Vincent Denis, a Professor of Modern History at the Université de Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne , is due to deliver a paper at the University of Oxford entitled ‘Police and Identification in France, From the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Empire’. Denis has published widely on the history of individual identification in eighteenth-century and Napoleonic France, and most recently is the author of Une histoire de l’identité: France, 1715-1815 (Champvallon: Seyssel, 2008). His paper will take place on Monday 27 April 2009 at 5.15pm in the Mordan Hall of St Hugh’s College; for more information see here.
CFP: Forensic Image and Video Processing
Published April 1, 2009 Calls for Papers , Conferences Leave a CommentTags: CCTV, Crime, Forensics, Photography, Policing, Security, technology
Posted by Massimiliano Pagani. Paper submission is now open for the ‘Special Session on Forensic Image and Video Processing’ at the 6th International Symposium on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis (ISPA 2009) that will take place in in Salzburg, Austria on 16-18 September 2009. The objective of this Special Session is to bring together researchers and police forces in order to answer new forensic challenges with state of the art image and video processing research. For more info see the conference website; the call for papers is also available as a pdf. The deadline for the submission of full papers is 15 April 2009.
The Myth of Infallibility: Update
Published March 3, 2009 Member Activities , Publications Leave a CommentTags: Forensics, Registration
As we flagged last month, IdentiNet member Pierre Piazza has recently published an article on ‘Le mythe de l’infaillibilité’ in the online French journal Médiapart, in which he explores the worrying prevalence of human and technical errors in the history of identification, registration and scientific policing. The earlier link required subscription, but they have kindly allowed him to reproduce a full-text version here (pdf). Picture: stock.xchng
Fingertip Search
Published January 23, 2009 News Stories Leave a CommentTags: Appropriation, Britain, Crime, Fingerprinting, Forensics, technology, United States
A new technique for recovering fingerprints invented by a British forensic scientist is being implemented in the US. The method was developed by Dr John Bond, the scientific support manager of Northamptonshire Police and an Honorary Fellow of the Forensic Research Centre at the University of Leicester. It uses charged ceramic beads coated with black powder to disclose the unique patterns of salt corrosion left by human fingertips on metallic surfaces, especially shell casings; unlike normal fingerprint residues, these cannot be wiped off, are impervious to heat and do not deteriorate over time. Once revealed, they are baked, photographed and analysed in the standard manner. The technique, which has already been used in connection with half a dozen North American ‘cold cases’, is currently being applied to bullet casings found at the scene of an unsolved shooting which took place in Bristol, Connecticut in 1998. For more information, see BBC News. Picture: stock.xchng
