Post by woofytreats on Jun 12, 2016 21:20:56 GMT
The talk here of handwriting analysis reminds me of something I've long wondered about. I can summarize it with a simple question:
"What percentage of the male population in California at the time had a similar handwriting style to the Zodiac?"
This is getting at population norms which we might think were a staple of the field. As in, here is the way people tend to group regarding their handwriting and here are the relative sizes of each group. I've never come across anything like that, so I took a quick look online at textbooks and scholarly papers. Apparently, no, it's not been done. I'd love to be told I'm wrong about this.
It wouldn't be hard to do. Here's one paper that takes a few steps in that direction:
Individuality of Handwriting (Srihari et al. 2002)
ftp.cedar.buffalo.edu/papers/articles/Individuality_Handwriting_2002.pdf
They collect the data (samples from 1,500 people) but do something else with it. Shame.
IMO, people's handwriting often has more similarities than dissimilarities, so assigning levels of similarity might be pretty broad in grouping people by age, sex, location, size of loops, etc. without being overly clinical. I view handwriting analysis as an inexact discipline whereby without a very strict criteria of what constituted "similar" combined with a million samples, you probably wouldn't get a result that represented a particular percentage of the male population in California or elsewhere. Although I don't think Ted K was the Zodiac, as a layman, it's amazing how close his writing appears to the Zodiac letters. If I ask "how many people write like Ted Kaczynski?", I can't help but think that you'll probably run into the same need for an exacting definition at the micro vs. macro level that may or may not represent what you're looking for.
At last count, I believe the Zodiac case has document examiners issuing opinions on four different suspects...each concluding that exemplars associated with each suspect are likely written by the Zodiac. I don't know, but it seems that this thought might play into the concept of being able to define how many male California residents wrote like Zodiac.