Call for Papers
Textual Identity: Authorship and Writing Style in Current Research
Following the successful launch event in November 2025 at Ruhr University Bochum, we are delighted to invite you to the symposium “Textual Identity: Authorship and Writing Style in Current Research”. The conference is organised by the Department of English Studies at the University of Graz in cooperation with The Forensic Linguistics Lab and will take place on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 November 2026 at the University of Graz.
At the heart of authorship analysis lies the question of the writer’s identity and, consequently, how the writer’s presence manifests itself linguistically within a text. This is based on the observation that, within the language system, individuals make a specific selection from the available means of expression. Such recurring patterns in language use then make it possible to attribute texts to a specific individual. As texts often have far-reaching consequences in legal contexts, authorship analysis forms one of the key pillars of forensic linguistics.
The aim of the symposium is to foster dialogue between theoretical approaches, empirical research and practical application. Furthermore, the event aims to intensify academic exchange between German-speaking authorship research and international perspectives. A forensic focus is expressly encouraged, but we also welcome contributions from outside the field of forensics. We therefore cordially invite submissions for presentations on topics relating to authorship analysis. Possible areas of focus include, amongst others:
- Challenges for authorship analysis posed by LLMs and linguistic approaches to addressing them
- Individual language use in different contexts and across contexts
- Methods for analysing linguistic individuality
- The application of linguistic methods in specific case studies
- Automated procedures in authorship analysis (with a particular focus on practical applications using small text samples)
- Which features may indicate multiple authors, and how should such texts be handled? Which methods of analysis are appropriate here?
- Authorship analysis in the digital age: specific challenges relating to digital texts, multimodality, anonymity, auto-correction and auto-completion (text completion), etc.
- Cross-linguistic authorship analysis: can texts in different languages (e.g. German and English) be compared with one another? Which features are carried over by authors from one language to the other?
- Translation tools: can texts that have been altered by translation tools be identified as such? What traces do such tools leave behind?
- Disguise strategies and how they can be detected
- The interplay between language and personality: what can language reveal about personality in a forensic context? What are the possibilities and limitations of such methods?
- Multiple authorship: how should texts that may have been written by more than one person be handled? Which methods are suitable here? How can results be presented?
- What are the limitations of authorship analysis?
- Creation and use of corpora for authorship analysis: what corpora exist in the German-speaking world, which ones would be necessary, what characteristics should they have, what data would need to be collected, etc.?
- Expert witness practice in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: how does one become an expert witness; what training is required; what does it mean to be an expert witness in forensic linguistics?
- Language profiling: relationships between language and age, educational background, regional origin, gender, ideology, etc. (in particular, what is relevant in practice, what poses challenges, how can current methods be improved, etc.)
- Ethical issues in case work and how to address them
We welcome contributions addressing these and similar topics. The focus of the event is on authorship analysis in a German-speaking context. Contributions on other languages are welcome and will be considered subject to the availability of programme slots.
Presentations are scheduled to last 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A session. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words (excluding references). Contributions and presentations may be in German or English.
Please send submissions to autorschaft(at)uni-graz.at