Forensic Apophenia: Sensing the Bioinformation Archive

Abstract

These wider questions about the relevance of pertinent, if unusual, lines of enquiry are lost in a procurement model of forensic provision which aims to cut costs and lead times, and provide enforcement teams with a promise of certainty which can only be sustained through the fragmentation of the questions to be asked of evidence. The field of forensics entails articulations of what Susan Lepselter has described as 'apophenia', that is, the experiential dimensions and capacities tied to the perception of 'connections between random and unrelated objects' (Lepselter 2016:3). In forensics, this capacity connects knowledge to method and technique as much as to perception. It engages scientific apparatuses and the senses and is explicitly articulated through the analogies of trace and signal. Forensic practitioners describe their activities as the production of information out of inchoate traces, clues or signals, following 19 th century pioneer of forensic science Edmond Locard's maxim, 'every contact leaves a trace' (Petherick et al. 2010). The forensic scientists we met in the course of our research had extensive expertise in a range of subfields of technical specialization, having led high-profile investigations such as the one of the five Ipswich murders. Their accounts of forensic practice reflected on their quest to make sense of the multiplicity of elements which appeared at first sight haphazard or fortuitous. Forensic practice was also unequivocally tied to the cultivation of a haptic and practical capacity to sense in order to then 'make sense' out of multiple, fragmentary and contingent traces.Our interlocutors referred to specific examples, notably blood spatter analysis and fiber identification, to illustrate how, through technoscientific practices of observation and the application of methods of classification and comparison, they were able to 'make sense'. In this article, we consider how forensic experts' accounts of their professional practice and their descriptions of the technoscientific and sensory operations tied to deciphering, for example, blood stains or traces of fabric, may be said to directly connect to Lepselter's (2016) conceptual analysis of apophenia as a sensory and analytical operation to establish relations among disparate, otherwise unconnected elements.Forensic practitioners described 'making sense' in forensics as more than 'the scientific practices of upholding or rejecting a given hypothesis in view of the evidence' -a senior forensic scientist explained to us. In our conversation, they noted the seemingly paradoxical discrepancy between the large data outputs produced in forensic labs vis-àvis the relatively small number of cases that eventually make it to court. They wondered