CONTENT RATING: universal

Can you tell your real individual from your robot agent? In the ultimate game of Bot or Not, would you stake $26m of your own money on it? Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast.

This episode was supported by UKRI as part of the annual Festival of Social Science. Each year this Festival celebrates the amazing research and advancements of our best and brightest social scientists. Hundreds of events are running all over the country from the 19^th of October to the 09^th of November, and this year’s theme is “Our Digital Lives”.

Play the real Bot or Nots

• Audio Edition: can you your doting aunt from your digital agent?
• Text Edition: can you spot the scam, AI-generated hotel reviews?

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CONTENT RATING: universal

Did Shakespeare really write, well, Shakespeare? Or is the Swan of Avon a five century old con? Part 5 of this slowburn mini-series pitches the computational linguists against the forensic linguists in an effort to determine whether either side can work out who wrote Shakespeare. Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →

CONTENT RATING: universal

Did Shakespeare really write, well, Shakespeare? Or is the Swan of Avon a five century old con? Part 4 of this slowburn mini-series looks at our last two possible contenders and weighs up the evidence. Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →

CONTENT RATING: universal

Did Shakespeare really write, well, Shakespeare? Or is the Swan of Avon a five century old con? Part 3 of this slowburn mini-series looks at our first three possible alternatives and weighs up the evidence. Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →

CONTENT RATING: universal

Did Shakespeare really write, well, Shakespeare? Or is the Swan of Avon a five century old con? Part 2 explores why we doubt Shakespeare and what happens if we kill him off. Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →

CONTENT RATING: universal

Did Shakespeare really write…well, Shakespeare? Or is the Swan of Avon a five-century-old con? Part 1 of this slowburn mini-series looks at the question “Who wrote Shakespeare?” Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →

CONTENT RATING: Universal

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When you have codebreakers like Alan Turing to contend with, how do you come up with a code that even the smartest people alive can’t break? This episode tells the story of the Native American codetalkers, starting with the Choctaw codetalkers in WWI. en clair is a podcast about forensic linguistics, literary detection, and language mysteries from past to present. Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →

CONTENT RATING: PG-13

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Can you make a person confess to a crime they haven’t committed? To a crime as serious as murder? What about a whole group of people? This episode tells the story of the disappearances of two men and the series of confessions spun out of thin air afterwards. en clair is a podcast about forensic linguistics, literary detection, and language mysteries from past to present. Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →

A quick update: whilst some (many?!) of you like the dramatic music and, well, ambience (which I actually use to disguise lots of terrible audio-engineering hacks) I know that some listeners find the non-voice audio tracks really distracting. I have therefore uploaded the whole of Season 01 again in a Voice Only format, which I will never be able to bring myself to listen to.

Apologies to anyone who saw episodes ping up on their phones and thought new stuff had landed. It’s just the same old stuff, but in a supremely minimalist format.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas!

CONTENT RATING: Universal

See the Self-care page if you need support.

We’re going on holiday for a bit. It’s a vacation before we start Season Two. On this note, what sort of cases, you might ask, will Season Two bring? And what can you listen to, read, or watch, till en clair returns? Below you will find data, audio credits, further reading, and a transcript of the podcast. Continue reading →