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Can confirm. My uncle is a stenographer, I learned all about it. If I remember correctly, just to get his license he had to hit 270w/m. He said he can get up t

Can confirm. My uncle is a stenographer, I learned all about it. If I remember correctly, just to get his license he had to hit 270w/m. He said he can get up to about 300w/m. The raw transcripts are composed of shorthand codes, and letters that represent syllables and other components of speech. I saw that many words were just represented by one or a few letters. So, by "words", we are often talking about codes of only a few letters. They are printed on thermal receipt width paper, and floppy disk (this was about 15 years ago). > I'm also curious how this works for court cases where a language other than English comes into play, alongside English. Canada might be a good example, where French and English dialogue might often co-exist. It shouldn't matter what language it is, because the stenographer has their own custom shorthand dictionary. The raw transcript that they generate is for the stenographers internal use. Only after the trail do they transcribe it into human readable form. Lawyers then have to pay the stenographer a fee for their transcripts. My uncle told me that it is common for multiple lawyers to each pay him a fee that he charges by the page. He, like most court reporters, outsources their transcription to other people via Email. It requires human transcription, because the raw transcripts need to be interpreted. It is not a something that you can just run through a filter. His scopists[1] will email him back and fourth for clarification on parts of the transcript they don't understand. This is important, because their transcripts are the official legal record of what happened in a trial. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopist [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

stickfigure 6y ago
In an age where audio/video recording + storage is essentially free, this practice seems... quaint.
- apostacy 6y ago
  Actually, it's more like the court reporter is the official witness. They are attesting to what happened in the courtroom. The actual instrument that the reporter uses is much less important. And trials have the audio recorded anyway. I know that when my uncle started in the early 90s, there were still some court reporters that used shorthand with pencil and paper. I don't think there is a requirement that they use a steno machine. Their job isn't to record what happened, their job is to generate a single authoritative transcript that everyone works from. In theory, they could probably not take notes at all, and just work from the recording later, but it is probably easier to take the first round of notes live. When a court reporter generates a transcript, they sometimes have to go back through the audio recordings sometimes and actually clarify in the official transcript exactly what was said. They have to make it clear in the transcript if people were talking over each other, or to try to clarify what exactly was said if it might be ambiguous. I think it is a good idea for a trial to have an official record that has been processed by a human, instead of just throwing a recording up and calling it a day. Think of how inefficient it would be otherwise, where all of the parties would essentially have to act as their own court reporters and generate their own transcripts. What if different parties disagreed with the interpretation of the transcripts? Perhaps the court would then have to appoint a neutral expert to make an authoritative determination of what was said; and we've now re-invented the court-reporter role. I think there is a tendency for people to look at this only as a technical problem to be solved. Like with voting, it isn't just a matter of securely tallying votes, there is much more to it. The process requires maximizing transparency and minimizing room for anyone to contest it.
  - eckza 6y ago
    As a teenager / college-aged kid, I provided "IT assistance" to family, friends, and friends of family/friends for a fee. One of my best clients was middle-aged mother of three - let's call her Pat, because that's close enough - whose home IT setup always needed a lot of extra love. Weird viruses on old machines, ancient printers that had to be coaxed to work well when shared over a network, "what laptop should I buy my son for college" - the usual. She was a court reporter, by trade. I had to help her with her laptop and court reporting software / hardware from time to time - it was very interesting. She had a custom "keyboard" that only had 10-15 unlabeled keys that really looked more like long and thin paddles than anything else; it worked with a program that recorded audio and tracked it to her inputs. So she could wind the report back to any given point in time, and it would highlight what she'd typed as it went. So if she needed clarification on something - she could enable audio playback that showed what she had transcribed, not unlike a karaoke machine. It was all very interesting stuff. I was a little sad when I had to tell her that I couldn't do work for her anymore, because I didn't have the time to do side work due to a developing career and social life.
    - lathiat 6y ago
      There is a product called "LiveScribe" which is a pen for handwritten notes that also records the audio. It uses a special "GPS" paper with a location pattern in it and you can tap your note and it seeks back to the relevant audio. I think it also digitises the actual notes but I am not 100% on the exacts of that. Interesting in any case.
  - tanatocenose 6y ago
    sounds quaint.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    >I think it is a good idea for a trial to have an official record that has been processed by a human, instead of just throwing a recording up and calling it a day. especially if someone points at someone else or uses other means of communication. Of course the judge can then say what was communicated so there is a verbal record in the recording but it is probably better that the court reporter is there in that case.
- eitland 6y ago
  It is totally amazing what almost-instant 100% correct (including puns and jokes that I would easily miss as a non native and that automatic captioning would definitely miss) texting does to live streams. Source: I saw it at an Angular conference in London three years or so ago. One interesting bit for nerds: those people study up on different topics (law, programming etc) to customize their dictionaries and get it correct every time.

stickfigure 6y ago

In an age where audio/video recording + storage is essentially free, this practice seems... quaint.

apostacy 6y ago
Actually, it's more like the court reporter is the official witness. They are attesting to what happened in the courtroom. The actual instrument that the reporter uses is much less important. And trials have the audio recorded anyway. I know that when my uncle started in the early 90s, there were still some court reporters that used shorthand with pencil and paper. I don't think there is a requirement that they use a steno machine. Their job isn't to record what happened, their job is to generate a single authoritative transcript that everyone works from. In theory, they could probably not take notes at all, and just work from the recording later, but it is probably easier to take the first round of notes live. When a court reporter generates a transcript, they sometimes have to go back through the audio recordings sometimes and actually clarify in the official transcript exactly what was said. They have to make it clear in the transcript if people were talking over each other, or to try to clarify what exactly was said if it might be ambiguous. I think it is a good idea for a trial to have an official record that has been processed by a human, instead of just throwing a recording up and calling it a day. Think of how inefficient it would be otherwise, where all of the parties would essentially have to act as their own court reporters and generate their own transcripts. What if different parties disagreed with the interpretation of the transcripts? Perhaps the court would then have to appoint a neutral expert to make an authoritative determination of what was said; and we've now re-invented the court-reporter role. I think there is a tendency for people to look at this only as a technical problem to be solved. Like with voting, it isn't just a matter of securely tallying votes, there is much more to it. The process requires maximizing transparency and minimizing room for anyone to contest it.
- eckza 6y ago
  As a teenager / college-aged kid, I provided "IT assistance" to family, friends, and friends of family/friends for a fee. One of my best clients was middle-aged mother of three - let's call her Pat, because that's close enough - whose home IT setup always needed a lot of extra love. Weird viruses on old machines, ancient printers that had to be coaxed to work well when shared over a network, "what laptop should I buy my son for college" - the usual. She was a court reporter, by trade. I had to help her with her laptop and court reporting software / hardware from time to time - it was very interesting. She had a custom "keyboard" that only had 10-15 unlabeled keys that really looked more like long and thin paddles than anything else; it worked with a program that recorded audio and tracked it to her inputs. So she could wind the report back to any given point in time, and it would highlight what she'd typed as it went. So if she needed clarification on something - she could enable audio playback that showed what she had transcribed, not unlike a karaoke machine. It was all very interesting stuff. I was a little sad when I had to tell her that I couldn't do work for her anymore, because I didn't have the time to do side work due to a developing career and social life.
  - lathiat 6y ago
    There is a product called "LiveScribe" which is a pen for handwritten notes that also records the audio. It uses a special "GPS" paper with a location pattern in it and you can tap your note and it seeks back to the relevant audio. I think it also digitises the actual notes but I am not 100% on the exacts of that. Interesting in any case.
- tanatocenose 6y ago
  sounds quaint.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >I think it is a good idea for a trial to have an official record that has been processed by a human, instead of just throwing a recording up and calling it a day. especially if someone points at someone else or uses other means of communication. Of course the judge can then say what was communicated so there is a verbal record in the recording but it is probably better that the court reporter is there in that case.
eitland 6y ago
It is totally amazing what almost-instant 100% correct (including puns and jokes that I would easily miss as a non native and that automatic captioning would definitely miss) texting does to live streams. Source: I saw it at an Angular conference in London three years or so ago. One interesting bit for nerds: those people study up on different topics (law, programming etc) to customize their dictionaries and get it correct every time.