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I'm leery of even audio recordings, but too much information and nuance can be contained in tone and phrasing that it is probably necessary. Also, it is signifi

I'm leery of even audio recordings, but too much information and nuance can be contained in tone and phrasing that it is probably necessary. Also, it is significantly harder to manipulate audio records.

hexane360 8y ago
It's definitely not harder to manipulate audio records than video records. Video is images + audio. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe-voco-photoshop-for-audio-speech-editing/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe...
- larkeith 8y ago
  Parent likely meant as compared to text-only transcripts.
gowld 8y ago
Tone conveys a lot, but deserves no place in a courtroom which should be about facts and opinions, or rhetorical flourish.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  I think there are a decent number of English sentences where adding or removing emphasis on words makes a significant difference to meaning. Google autocompletes "sentences where emphasis changes meaning". None of them looks like a nice list, but "I didn't say you stole my money" is proffered as an example where you can choose any of 7 words in the sentence to emphasize and end up with 7 different meanings; "I love studying English" is another. It seems that the pattern is, there is one common face-value meaning of the sentence that is meant regardless of the emphasis, and then there is a secondary meaning that depends on the emphasis. Usually one of the words simply makes the sentence more emphatic, but emphasizing any of the other words establishes some kind of contrast (not too different from the way "if" is sometimes used to mean "if (and only if)"): e.g. "I didn't say you stole my money" implies "I did say <someone else> stole my money", "I love studying English" may imply "I don't love <doing something else with> English". Even "I didn't say you stole my money" probably implies "I did say <someone else> stole my <something else>". And often the secondary meaning is at least as important as the primary meaning. I suspect this kind of expression is natural enough that forbidding everyone in the courtroom from using it is impractical. Given that it can matter so much, trusting scribes to accurately record the emphasis, without keeping audio recordings around, seems dangerous. (One might say something similar about the transcription itself.)
- BookmarkSaver 8y ago
  I wasn't talking about emotion or opinion or feeling, I'm talking about emphasis and phrasing. English is often very ambiguous as spoken, without calling out emphasis, and I don't think there is any practical way to enforce purely unambiguous speech patterns (as transcribed to text) upon all participants in a courtroom situation.

hexane360 8y ago

It's definitely not harder to manipulate audio records than video records. Video is images + audio. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe-voco-photoshop-for-audio-speech-editing/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe...

larkeith 8y ago
Parent likely meant as compared to text-only transcripts.

gowld 8y ago

Tone conveys a lot, but deserves no place in a courtroom which should be about facts and opinions, or rhetorical flourish.

waterhouse 8y ago
I think there are a decent number of English sentences where adding or removing emphasis on words makes a significant difference to meaning. Google autocompletes "sentences where emphasis changes meaning". None of them looks like a nice list, but "I didn't say you stole my money" is proffered as an example where you can choose any of 7 words in the sentence to emphasize and end up with 7 different meanings; "I love studying English" is another. It seems that the pattern is, there is one common face-value meaning of the sentence that is meant regardless of the emphasis, and then there is a secondary meaning that depends on the emphasis. Usually one of the words simply makes the sentence more emphatic, but emphasizing any of the other words establishes some kind of contrast (not too different from the way "if" is sometimes used to mean "if (and only if)"): e.g. "I didn't say you stole my money" implies "I did say <someone else> stole my money", "I love studying English" may imply "I don't love <doing something else with> English". Even "I didn't say you stole my money" probably implies "I did say <someone else> stole my <something else>". And often the secondary meaning is at least as important as the primary meaning. I suspect this kind of expression is natural enough that forbidding everyone in the courtroom from using it is impractical. Given that it can matter so much, trusting scribes to accurately record the emphasis, without keeping audio recordings around, seems dangerous. (One might say something similar about the transcription itself.)
BookmarkSaver 8y ago
I wasn't talking about emotion or opinion or feeling, I'm talking about emphasis and phrasing. English is often very ambiguous as spoken, without calling out emphasis, and I don't think there is any practical way to enforce purely unambiguous speech patterns (as transcribed to text) upon all participants in a courtroom situation.