Ripperologist 91: May 2008

[AdamNeilWood]

Hot off the electronic presses once again is the monthly fix of informed articles, news and reviews that is Ripperologist magazine.

With a recent restructuring of the Rip's editorial line-up, we open this issue with Meet the Team - a chance to get to know those on board the good ship Ripperologist.

Adam Wood's editorial follows with Coloured by Context, a look at reaction to the Museum in Docklands' Jack the Ripper and the East End exhibition.

In the first of a two articles on Mary Kelly, Leanne Perry, in Will You Lend Me Sixpence?, takes a closer look at the men in Mary's life. Bob Hinton then asks how safe was Caroline Maxwell’s testimony? in Maxwell Under the Microscope.

It’s Madness! state Jennifer Pegg and Don Souden, as they take another look at the Ripperologists in our midst.

Jenni and Adam return with their regular columns, and does Chris Scott with his superb Press Trawl.

We then report on the very latest news and reviews to round off the issue.

And that's not all - future issues will include articles on Buck's Row, Teaching Jack the Ripper, Maybrick, and anti-Semitism - not to mention the sight of the first known photograph of a major suspect. All coming soon in the Rip! 6 all-colour issues direct to your email inbox for just £12. Subscribe now!

Would you like to write for Ripperologist? We'd love to hear from you. Send your ideas to contact@ripperologist.info

Best wishes,
Adam Wood
Executive Editor,
Ripperologist

https://www.ripperologist.info

[Supe]

Darn! And I was so hoping they would put a rendering of the Apollo Belvedere over my name instead of that raggedy (but, alas, accurate) picture of me in the "Meet the Team" sectiuon.

Don.

[Robert]

Don Souden in his hitchhiking days. In ten years, only one old lady ever stopped.

[Tom_Wescott]

Congrats to Jennifer Pegg, the new man-aging edit her.

Don,

Bar graphs? You're giving me bar graphs? Bring back the pie charts, buddy, or it'll mean the end of your cabal! The Bar Graph Society just doesn't have a ring to it.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Christine]

I can see why Robert, he's missing three...er...limbs.

[Tom_Wescott]

I can see why Robert, he's missing three...er...limbs.

What do you call a girl with one leg and no arms standing against a wall?

Eileen.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Supe]

Robert,

Thank you, but just a head shot was all I wanted.

Christine,

You are clearly a cautious person and not likely to goi out on a limb.

Tom,

We have a couple of pie charts, but unfortunately somebody found the others in the staff refrigerator, mistook them for raspberry trifle and ate them. But still an interesting article, bar none.

Don.

[Robert]

Of course, this could be a sculpture of Kosminski - after a solution was found to his solitary vices.

[Tom_Wescott]

Tom,

We have a couple of pie charts, but unfortunately somebody found the others in the staff refrigerator, mistook them for raspberry trifle and ate them.

My money's on Magpie!

But still an interesting article, bar none.

I will agree you really raised the bar with this new article. The no holds barred approach really works for you. Barring any unforseen difficulties, I hope to see more of this kind of work, even if only as a sidebar.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Supe]

Tom,

Anymore of that and we'll have you behind bars--apposed to behind the bar at Paul Begg's pub.

Don.

[The Grave Maurice]

I'm waiting patiently for Ally's review of this issue.

[Tom_Wescott]

Two men walk into a Don/Jenni survey...

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Monty]

Another survey?

As Lector said, a census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Im begining to finally understand why.

Monty

[Neal Shelden]

Two men walk into a Don/Jenni survey...

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Don and Jenni, didn't they used to make ice cream

[Ally]

It begins with an editorial regarding the Dockland's conference that consists mostly of long quotes from the casebook glued together with a couple of original linking sentences. If you've read the Casebook thread on it, you can just skip the editorial entirely.

Then there is an article by Leanne Perry. There’s not a single exclamation point in the thing!! There are however “we’s”. The war against unnecessary pronouns, sadly, goes on. For the most part this is a well-written article. The fault in the article lies not in the writing, but in the conclusions, assumptions or suggestions. For instance, there are several cases where the author glosses over “fact” because assumption is much more preferable or comes to conclusions that are in direct contradiction to the majority of the available evidence, preferring to hinge a “what if” on the remotest of possibilities. For example the majority of newspaper reports that state Barnett was of clean and sober appearance on the day of the inquest testimony are casually shunted aside to speculate on a single newspaperman’s personal opinion that Barnett was drunk. In addition, the idea that Barnett might have stuttered at the inquest due to nervousness is glossed over in favor of wild speculation about other undiagnosed conditions and illnesses that might have caused Barnett to stutter. She also references autism (LOL) and then refers to it two sentences later as if it had not already been referenced. Which was just puzzling. She stated that 75% of autistics suffered from echolalia, then two sentences later, after discussing schizophrenia states “another possibility, autism…” Jarring. But this is indicative of the overall problem, there is lots of speculation based on absolutely no evidence. Such as the speculation that because Fleming used an alias to check into a mental asylum (gee, I wonder if there’s any possible reason a person would not give their real name checking into a nuthouse) she wonders whether George Hutchinson was in fact Fleming. Based on no other evidence than that. Joe Fleming used an alias once, he therefore could have been George Hutchinson. I was convinced!


Next Bob Hinton describes the Caroline Maxwell story of meeting “Mary Kelly” after she’d been dead a while, and gives his opinion on how she could have been telling the truth and still been wrong. A speculative, opinion-based offering. Well-written, nice enough, if you go for that sort of thing.

Next Jennifer Pegg and Donald Souden gives us yet another in-depth look at Ripperologists where we find out yet again, that they are mostly male, mostly white, and mostly old. I think it’s finally sinking in for me, how about for you? We also find out that Ripperologists like do other things than study the Ripper, and they have jobs in various fields and like most people, some are single and some are not. I have two major beefs with this article. One is the misuse of mathematical symbols in both their pie charts. Apparently there are no Ripperologists aged 35 or 36. Everyone is either greater than 36 or less than 35 even though according to their written words it’s supposed to be aged 36 or over. There is such thing as a greater than or equal to sign. But this is something that only obsessively nitpicky and caustically critical types are likely to notice. Guilty. The second thing I have a problem with is their research methods. While they go to great pains to assure us (pages worth of assurance) that their research methods are sound and backed by the leading minds in the field, on the subject of looking at photographs as an attempt to analyze people, I have one word: Bullsh!t. Make that two words: total bullsh!t. Take such statements as this:
“in all the shots where discussion/talks were not clearly taking place the settings are very relaxed and there appears to be much social interaction. This leads us to conclude that Ripperologists are perhaps socially inclined creatures (this notion might be supported by the number of JtR message boards and forums, clubs, meetings and other gatherings that take place, including Conferences!).”

This of course would be relevant if not for certain things that one has to take into consideration. Like, how all social times, interactions and settings are scripted at conferences. There are socialization breaks. The people who would attend a conference are, by their nature more likely to be sociable and this does not take into account the vast majority of Ripperolgists who do NOT attend conferences and stay home. Nor does it take into account the Ripperologists who attend the conferences for the academic lectures and are hiding in their hotel rooms rather than participate in the socialization portion of the evening. So they are taking a scripted social setting, designed to encourage and promote socialization among a small cross section of people who have chosen to be there and socialize and attempting to generalize a statement about the socialization habits of a discipline. Nope. Don’t think so. Another problem with picture analysis in general is it attempts to make broad generalizations based on a single second in time, like in this example:

“Photograph C (a shot from New Jersey) is one instance where there are more women in view than men, but it is interesting to note that in this shot the women are all focusing on what the male is saying.”

This statement clearly invites the reader to make an inference about gender and Ripperology and without any consideration to the very simple idea that at that single second in time this photo was taken, the women were all looking at the man simply because he was the one talking and if the photo had been snapped 3 seconds before, one of the women might have been speaking. Was this indeed the ONLY shot of that table available, or was it the one the researchers selected for the purpose of conveying their implication, in which case, there is bias on the part of photograph selection. Without EVERY photograph available to the reader, the researchers are free to cherry pick the ones that say what they want them to say. On the plus side, the article was well written and other than a slight unfamiliarity with mathematical symbols, was nicely free of glaring mechanical errors.

Then comes the regular columns.

One thing of note to mention in this edition is Rip’s addition of the ‘Beadle Prize’ which is to go for those exhibiting “writing excellence”. I am quite sure this will mean no articles with “I” or “we” pronouns, will be considered as being worthy of the win.