We are STENO
February 7, 2021 2:25 PM   Subscribe

Brian Williams provided the perfect opening for stenographers to showcase their talents in the leadup to National Court Reporter and Captioning Week February 8-15. Who are they? What do they do? posted by probably not that Karen Blair (10 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
My aunt used to be a steno/transcriber so I've always been fascinated by the tools they use. She hopped from the pen and paper Gregg world into tape-recorded depositions transcribed with a normal typewriter, so it was TV that showed me these weird keyboards, and this is the first real in-depth exploration of those I've seen beyond learning that the record was 300wpm or whatever.

There's apparently steno software project looking to bring all this to programming, which seems like a very cool application, even if it winds up being yet another alternalte layout like DVORAK.

Cool post!
posted by rhizome at 3:16 PM on February 7, 2021 [2 favorites]


I've always been impressed that the "read that last statement back to me" thing in courtrooms isn't just a trick used by Hollywood to move the plot along, but is actually something that can happen and does happen. Stenographers are totally unsung heroes in our entire system. Shame on Williams -- I think he was just trying to do a cute "let's fill some time here" bit which is often how these things go wrong. I didn't always like how the call-out was executed, but it was a worthwhile call-out nonetheless.
posted by hippybear at 4:03 PM on February 7, 2021 [4 favorites]


Fascinating - thank you! Vid of machine transcription vs steno was impressive!
posted by esoteric things at 4:11 PM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


I have often wondered why programming doesn’t have a set of specialized tools on the hardware and text entry side. It seems like an obvious oversight.
posted by mhoye at 5:05 PM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


I became familiar with stenography when I was in university. It accommodated my hearing loss by sending a stenographer with my to my lectures and discussion sessions. The stenographer would have a normal steno keyboard thing and the text would appear on a laptop screen for me to read. The stenographer would have preprogrammed names of my classmates and key words provided by the professor to speed things along.

At least one of the women who worked with me was also a court reporter when she wasn't doing on-site captioning for the likes of me.
posted by Fukiyama at 5:28 PM on February 7, 2021 [8 favorites]


I have often wondered why programming doesn’t have a set of specialized tools on the hardware and text entry side. It seems like an obvious oversight.

I see it as probably complicated, particular since the steno machines writers predate most kinds of computers at 100 years old now. However the roots route, the IRS and the military being the major early consumers of computers (perhaps also programming originally being women's work) meant that there was going to be a lot of turnover and people used to working within standardized enviornments, so better use the input device that is already dominant.

I can see steno writers being a) niche-y, specialized to the courts, and b) customizable. My understanding from the video about Plover I posted up there is that every stenographer has a different configuration, sets of mnemonics and chordal abbreviations, which would be a training problem at the departmental and institutional level. Sure, there could be a standardized configuration that everybody learns, but eventually there's going to be new stuff to be added, which in a standardization situation would require committee approval or something.

Or so my just-so story would have you believe, anyway.
posted by rhizome at 6:52 PM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


For a great informative resource on how steno works on keyboards I recommend the free online book Art of Chording. This book comes from the same community as the Plover software mentioned earlier in this thread: Open Steno Project. Their credo:
We are freeing stenography in an industry that is locked down, proprietary, and expensive.
posted by Martijn at 1:41 AM on February 8, 2021 [1 favorite]


I have often wondered why programming doesn’t have a set of specialized tools on the hardware and text entry side. It seems like an obvious oversight.

APL famously had specialized characters for programming. It proved unportable and annoying to read.

There are now, however, fonts with ligatures that make some programming a little prettier to read at least.
posted by Xoder at 8:33 AM on February 8, 2021


This is a very interesting post, but it does seem like a missive from a dying art.

Real-time captioning has come a long way and I ee it reaching the same level of accuracy as a professional stenographer in short order. Voice recognition and translation/transcription has become highly important and billions of dollars rest on doing it really well.
posted by Phreesh at 12:04 PM on February 9, 2021


I have often wondered why programming doesn’t have a set of specialized tools on the hardware and text entry side. It seems like an obvious oversight.

We do have a lot of these, but they're typically handled in software rather than hardware. A lot of devs I've worked with have fairly complex macros and shortcuts to drop templates into their code, for example. (Also, while most devs do want to be able to write code as fast as possible, the limiting factor is frankly very often their speed of thought, not speed of typing.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 2:22 PM on February 9, 2021


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