Questioned documents & forensic handwriting analysis
Also known, diplomatics or forensic paleography -- is the kind of job you'd enjoy if you don't want to get stuck with a fake reprint of a Ty Cobb baseball card next time you head to Antiques Roadshow. But the real Ty Cobb card and the fake Ty Cobb card look exactly the same!" you'll yell when the appraiser tells you you've been duped. And in fact they will. And if it's a good forgery, the paper will even have the patina of age that comes about through years of sitting in a footlocker somewhere -- or, in the case of the forgery, being baked in a fraudster's oven to artificially dehydrate the inks and weather the paper.
In a case like this, the forensic document analyzer will look at everything he has at his disposal, including whether the baseball card is signed. If it is, a whole other branch of the discipline opens up, in particular handwriting analysis, a true forensic art that is based on nuance and subjectivity as much as anything in forensics can be. If it's not, and you need a for-sure answer, the examiner can even look at the carbon in the fibers of the paper. No matter how good a forgery it is, it's damn near impossible to fake the carbon-dating of the paper it's printed on. If it's valuable enough, who's to say that the forger didn't create the duplicate on paper stock from the era?
Case study: the Hitler diaries
Take another famous case the forensic diplomatics solved -- the Hitler Diaries. In the early 80s, a German magazine published portions of what they thought were the hand-written journal entries of Adolf Hitler. The magazine had paid a fortune for these. The journalist who claimed he discovered them sent them for review by -- no, not forensic scientists -- but World War II historians. Based on the content alone, the experts ruled the documents authentic, a decision largely based on the concurrence of dates and events. Fueling the rush to positive authentication was the director of the newspaper, who jumped on the authentic band-wagon.
Did anybody ever think to call the forensics guy? Ahhh, no.
But he came calling anyway: Julius Grant, a British secret agent and forensic scientist, decided to have a look. This was a guy who made a living doing chemical analysis of inks, papers and materials used in making documents, and testifying to what he found in court. And he was no slouch. Leading authorities regularly regarded him as the greatest forensic scientist in the realm of diplomatics and document analysis. When shown the purported Hitler Diaries, Grant took all of two weeks to reach his conclusion:
Fake. Really fake.
Not only was the ink brand-spanking new, the paper had been aged like some kid burning the edges of a 6th grade treasure map. A real Kinko's special. On top of this, it's the scientist who discovers the historical inaccuracies too -- not really the job of a pure forensic document examiner, but nevertheless the kind of thing it doesn't hurt to be good at if this is your cup of tea.
So... if you have an eye for art, a mind for history, or a penchant for visual analysis combined with a scientist's analytical curiosity, then diplomatics is definitely a field to consider. Unlike other branches of forensics, document examination work is very apprenticeship-based. It really takes a lot of time, working with a seasoned veteran, to learn the nuances of piecing together all the disparate facts in a forgery case. Of course, many of the lab techniques used (like thin-layer chromatography for ink analysis, or carbon dating for fiber aging) can be learned in a lab, but the rest is a true art. But hey -- this is the kind of job for someone with the mind of a scientist and the heart of an artist.
Good reads
There aren't a lot of books out there on the topic, but a really popular one is Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents. The Kindle version is not too expensive, but like most limited-run academic texts, the hard copy is going to set you back. It's a niche field, questioned documents examination, and the price reflects that. But it's a good primer for someone considering a career in the field.
