This page is actually a short prelude to the whole podcast. Rather than including extended waffly introductions on every episode saying the same sorts of things over and over, I figured it made most sense to simply include all the generic information here, one time.<\/p>\n
All the current methods for subscribing are listed on the Listen<\/a> page.<\/p>\n You can also subscribe to this blog (top right of every page). This will send you an email every time a new episode and its Case Notes are published.<\/p>\n Alternatively, if you’re into Twitter, you can follow the podcast at en clair<\/a>. Or you can\u00a0follow me at DrClaireH<\/a>.<\/p>\n My name is Dr Claire Hardaker<\/a>, and I\u2019m based at Lancaster University<\/a> in the North West of England<\/a>, near to the coast<\/a>. Three interesting facts about Lancaster<\/a>:<\/p>\n I\u2019m based in the Linguistics & English Language (LAEL<\/a>) department which is one of the highest ranked linguistics departments in the world<\/a>. And in my position here, I am a forensic corpus linguist.<\/p>\n What does that mean? Well, rather aptly, given this podcast’s focus on crime and intrigue, the word corpus<\/em> comes from Latin, and roughly translates to body<\/em>, or more accurately in this case, to a large collection. A corpus linguist, then, is someone who looks at large linguistic datasets, usually in the millions or billions of words.<\/p>\n A forensic linguist, meanwhile, specialises in language, crime, and the law. This can include hate-speech, plagiarism, disputed authorship, terrorist manifestos, forged suicide notes, death threats, forced confessions, contractual ambiguities, and far more besides.<\/p>\n When you combine a corpus linguist and a forensic linguist, you get forensic corpus linguist who looks at a large criminal or legal linguistic datasets. For example, this might be a million tweets of online abuse. It could be five text messages sent by a murderer from a victim’s phone, pretending to be that victim versus a thousand actually sent by the victim. It could be a book supposedly written by a US president, but in reality ghost-written by someone else. And so on.<\/p>\n En clair is a casebook of forensic linguistic cases, literary detection, and language mysteries. It also looks at codes, cryptography, undeciphered languages, and linguistic myths and legends. Each episode presents a case of linguistic intrigue or controversy from ancient history to the present day.<\/p>\n As you can imagine, plenty of the episodes deal with crime. In some cases the subject is relatively anodyne \u2013 few people are likely to be distressed by the fine details of a Hollywood plagiarism battle. However, there are plenty of cases that feature different kinds of assault, several that involve murder, and a handful that are even darker. Each case is described with some detail \u2013 I come back to this a moment when I outline the general episode structure \u2013 but whilst I won’t needlessly dwell on grisly detail, some of the themes by themselves may prove distressing for sensitive or young listeners.<\/p>\n In short, I strongly advise general discretion for this whole series. If you plan on recommending these podcasts to younger audiences, or playing them in front of other people, ensure that you have carefully vetted the relevant episodes beforehand, so that you can judge for yourself whether they are age- and disposition-appropriate. I won’t repeat this warning on every episode, however, for podcasts where I think there is a much higher risk of potential distress than usual, I will state this at the start and flag up the themes that I think may be most problematic.<\/p>\nWho is responsible for en clair?<\/h1>\n
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What is en clair about?<\/h1>\n
What is the age-appropriacy of the content?<\/h1>\n
What kinds of cases will be covered?<\/h1>\n