Activities per year
Abstract
The Whitechapel murders that terrorized London in 1888 are still remembered to this day, thanks to the legend of its unapprehended perpetrator, Jack the Ripper. In addition to the gruesomeness of the murders, the name and the persona of the killer have been popularized by the over 200 letters signed as ‘Jack the Ripper’ that have been received following the murders. The most supported theory on the authorship of these letters is that some of the earliest key texts were written by journalists to sell more newspapers and that the same person is responsible for writing the two most iconic earliest letters. The present article reports on an authorship clustering/verification analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters with a view to detect the presence of one writer for the earliest and most historically important texts. After compiling the ‘Jack the Ripper Corpus’ consisting of the 209 letters linked to the case, a cluster analysis of the letters is carried out using the Jaccard distance of word 2-grams. The quantitative results and the discovery of certain shared distinctive lexicogrammatical structures support the hypothesis that the two most iconic texts responsible for the creation of the persona of Jack the Ripper were written by the same person. In addition, there is also evidence that a link exists between these texts and another of the key texts in the case, the Moab and Midian letter.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 621-636 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities |
Volume | 33 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 25 Jan 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2018 |
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Dive into the research topics of 'An authorship analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Datasets
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Jack the Ripper Corpus
Nini, A. (Creator), University of Manchester Figshare, 15 Mar 2021
DOI: 10.48420/14192897, https://figshare.manchester.ac.uk/articles/dataset/Jack_the_Ripper_Corpus/14192897
Dataset
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Impacts
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Forensic linguistic authorship analysis of disputed texts
Nini, A. (Participant)
Impact: Legal impacts, Societal impacts
Activities
- 5 Invited talk
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From Jack the Ripper to cybercrime: linguistics as a forensic science
Nini, A. (Speaker)
17 Nov 2022Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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A forensic linguistic analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters
Nini, A. (Speaker)
20 Jan 2022Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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A forensic linguistic analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters
Nini, A. (Speaker)
7 Aug 2021Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
Press/Media
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VARIOUS MEDIA: Jack the Ripper letter mystery solved by Manchester researcher
1/02/18 → 26/01/24
3 items of Media coverage, 1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Research