Acknowledgements
Funders
Funding was obtained from the David and Claudia Harding foundation and the Leverhulme Trust by Professor Niamh Nic Daéid who is principal investigator for this work. Dr Harry Gray was funded by the David and Claudia Harding foundation, and is a postdoctoral research assistant at LRCFS which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Thanks go to these funding bodies, who have made this non-traditional academic output possible. It is our intention that this resource will contribute to raising statistical and probabilistic literacy within forensic science by embracing emerging technology and positively disrupting the traditional way we engage others with statistical ideas.
Contributors
Mr Roy Mudie at LRCFS has been instrumental in developing the R Shiny application and interactive elements which accompany this book. This allows the html version of this book to contain interactive examples and questions which we hope enhance the users’ learning experience. The application can also be used as a standalone tool to engage with other statistical content. Roy has helped with many of the technical issues which have arisen behind the scenes and has helped to visualise some of our examples in a way that is intuitive.
Thanks also to Dr Pat Dugard, Ms Pauline Mack, Dr Joyce Klu, Dr Heather Doran, Dr Emma Comrie, Professor Lucina Hackman, and Professor Niamh Nic Daéid as members of an internal review team at LRCFS. This team provided feedback on the content and appearance of the book which has significantly improved its presentation, conciseness, and clarity.
A special thanks goes to our anonymous research participants who volunteered a large portion of their time to give feedback on this book and the accompanying R Shiny application. This group spanned external practising and academic forensic scientists, research students, and members of the LRCFS Citizen’s Jury. Their feedback helped to improve the technical precision of the content as well as showing us where to focus our efforts in order to make the materials more understandable and engaging.
Software
This book was written using the bookdown package (Xie 2016), which was built on top of R Rmarkdown (Xie, Allaire, and Grolemund 2018) and knitr (Xie 2015). This free and well-documented software has allowed this book to be developed hassle-free in a completely reproducible way. Thank you Yihui for your work to support open software and open science.
Other R packages that have been used throughout this book: (Csardi and Nepusz 2006; Wickham et al. 2019; Arnold 2024; Zhu 2024).
Interactive questions in this book have been made using a self-hosted instance of h5p Copyright © 2016 Joubel AS. The h5p content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and the code is available under an MIT license (see the LRCFS Github repository).