BBC Magazine - Is the art of shorthand dying?

[Owain]

For more than 2,000 years people have used shorthand to make note-taking quicker and more reliable. It's a skill that has weathered being banned by a Roman emperor and associations with witchcraft, but could technology finally kill it?

The UK vocational education group City and Guilds says there's been "a steady decrease in the number of people taking shorthand courses over the past 10 years". Although it's reluctant to release what it says is commercially sensitive information, it adds that "technical solutions", such as voice recording, are the "main cause for the decline".

No mention of any form of machine shorthand, but an interesting history of the manual version from its use in ancient Rome

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34603886

Owain

[Theodore Morin]

It is hard to take the writer seriously if they ignore a century old technology that is in wide use in the court systems 😕 am I wrong?

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[Steven Bhardwaj]

Agreed with Ted. That author's time might have been better spent adding to the shorthand wikipedia pages. Then the awkwardly bunk quotes about shorthand going extinct, as if it were the target of poachers smuggling traditionally medicinal animal products, would have been edited-out as POV and non-notable.

Plus,

• I'm learning Gregg (manual shorthand), and planning to teach it to my baby daughter,
  
• our very own Paulo Paniago uses Gregg versions in English and Portuguese,
  
• the ubiquitous Stanographer talks in his blog about how learning a version of Gregg was his gateway into steno,
  
• and there have been rumblings in the Atlantic Monthly about shorthand making a comeback, what with our awkwardly prevalent touchscreen devices.

I'm unfortunately been spending more effort on Gregg more than Plover recently, insufficient effort on either in any case, but am looking forward to switching the focus back to Plover once I get Gregg rolling and on-point... like a pen... ;)

But, glorious synergies abound. I figure I may start modding my theories so that my machine theory will reflect my manual theory, and vice versa. And I'm looking forward to taking notes in Gregg off-screen, and then rapidly transcribing them to the computer in Plover.

If you're interested in learning manual shorthand to supplement the Plover, check out greggshorthand.blogspot.com , a nice active forum with nice people and a lot of resources - reminds me of our own group here. Another great website is gregg.angelfishy.net which has digitized a bunch of free shorthand texts, and has many links to others. Shorthand books are cheap and widely available on eBay etc, and some theories have $10 texts still being published in-print.

Shorthand is alive and ready for a comeback, just like its little sister stenotype!

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[Selena Stehn]

Interesting read - nice history. However, I do not understand why they would insert the last paragraph. "People, even when I was training, were saying there's no use learning it, as they thought it wouldn't be long before words could be turned into text automatically," she says. "Well, we're here 54 years later and we're still waiting for that to appear. I don't think shorthand has died at all. I think it will be going on long after I'm carted off."


..."words could be turn...ed into text automatically" is already here -- REALTIME. We, as a whole, need to really promote "realtime." There are so many opportunities for our profession. It is up to us to make the public aware.

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Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 17:26:22 -0600
Subject: Re: BBC Magazine - Is the art of shorthand dying?
From: stevenb...@gmail.com
To: plove...@googlegroups.com

[Gabriel Holmes]

Speech recognition is a worthy goal -- but we're a long way from that, ads with Samuel L. Jackson having friendly conversations with Siri notwithstanding. The truth is, even with state of the art technology, speech recognition is still often slower than normal typing when you factor in the error rate and the need for repetition. The only way to get to a point where speech recognition is an acceptable alternative is with a lot of QA'ing. And that's going to be a lot more people transcribing speech a lot faster.

If the question is how we get computers to understand speech, especially when you start throwing in accents or multiple voices -- part of the answer is almost certainly open source machine stenography.