In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel considers how photographic, electronic, and digital media have been used to record and reconstruct accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Focusing in turn on the birth of the field of forensic engineering, Charles Babbage's invention of a "self-registering apparatus" for railroad trains, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders ("black boxes"), the science of automobile crash-testing, and various accident-reconstruction techniques and technologies, Siegel shows how "forensic media" work to transmute disruptive chance occurrences into reassuring narratives of causal succession. Through historical and philosophical analyses, he demonstrates that forensic media are as much technologies of cultural imagination as they are instruments of scientific inscription, as imbued with ideological fantasies as they are compelled by institutional rationales. By rethinking the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, Siegel sheds new light on the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.

The evidential role of matter—when media records trace evidence of violence—explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel considers how photographic, electronic, and digital media have been used to record and reconstruct accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Focusing in turn on the birth of the field of forensic engineering, Charles Babbage's invention of a "self-registering apparatus" for railroad trains, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders ("black boxes"), the science of automobile crash-testing, and various accident-reconstruction techniques and technologies, Siegel shows how "forensic media" work to transmute disruptive chance occurrences into reassuring narratives of causal succession. Through historical and philosophical analyses, he demonstrates that forensic media are as much technologies of cultural imagination as they are instruments of scientific inscription, as imbued with ideological fantasies as they are compelled by institutional rationales. By rethinking the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, Siegel sheds new light on the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.

Social media is becoming an increasingly important—and controversial—investigative source for law enforcement. Social Media Investigation for Law Enforcement provides an overview of the current state of digital forensic investigation of Facebook and other social media networks and the state of the law, touches on hacktivism, and discusses the implications for privacy and other controversial areas. The authors also point to future trends.

A new "textual studies" and archival approach to the investigation of works of new media and electronic literature that applies techniques of computer forensics to conduct media-specific readings of William Gibson's electronic poem "Agrippa," Michael Joyce's Afternoon, and the interactive game Mystery House.

This timely volume on case studies in forensic osteology with background information on how osteological analysis is applied to human/faunal remains found in legal contexts is primarily designed for students of forensic anthropology/osteology who have a background in human anatomy and/or osteology. It also will be of interest to those individuals lacking this background and who may very well want to read the book for its many case studies. Although many journals publish case reports, there are instances when a more detailed and full description of circumstances are warranted. Further, beginning students initially require a more thorough treatment of the thinking behind the application of analytical techniques; an important aspect that may not be covered in the professional literature. Based on the foregoing, the premise of this book is that each case has a unique quality and thus presents unique problems for the analyst to approach. It is important for the reader to understand the limits for forensic osteology by examining not only its successes but also its failures. This book presents this type of information. The chapters appear as follows: Forensic Osteological Analysis: An Introduction; Of Beasts and Humans: A Case of Recognition; Identification of Human Skeletal Remains: Was He a She or She a He?; Sex Determination: XX or XY from the Human Skeleton; Identification of a Missing Person Using Biomechanical and DNA Analysis: A Case Study; DISH Rats and a Rolex; Death on the Danforth; The Identification of the Remains of Don Francisco Pizarro; Clinkers on the Little Bighorn Battlefield: In Situ Investigation of Scattered Recent Cremains; The Wrong Urn: Commingling of Cremains in Mortuary Practices; Cremated Remains and Expert Testimony in a Homicide Case; An Anthropological Investigation of a Rural Homicide Scene; Forensic Osteology of Strangulation; Pathological Changes on Human Skeletal Remains: Before, During or After?; Unusual Skeletal Anomalies and Pathologies in Forensic Casework; Biker's Bones: An Avocational Syndrome; Identity Crisis: Two Case Studies -- Success and Failure in Personal Identification Determination; Mass Disasters: Comments and Discussion Regarding the Hinton Train Collision of 1986; The Role of Forensic Anthropology in Human Rights Issues; and Forensic Entomology: The Use of Insects in Death Investigations.

In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Beyond shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, Forensic Architecture has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere. Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.