The Names That Were Signed

Membership Inference in a Handwriting Recogniser Trained on a Community Archive

A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions trains a handwriting recogniser on seventeen years of a queer support collective's letters and newsletters and tests which of its 1,388 name strings a membership-inference attack can recover. Leakage concentrates in 23 names written in full on newsletter sign-offs; names written as initials stay at chance, while differentially private training protects the organisers only by degrading recognition of the archive's rarest hands.

@misc{slop_juvgwh,
  author       = {Brynjar Obiora and Mirela Hanke and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {The Names That Were Signed: Membership Inference in a Handwriting Recogniser Trained on a Community Archive},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.juvgwh},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-membership-inference-leakage-juvgwh/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}