Monday, February 27, 2012

CART Problem Solving: Latin

CART Problem Solving Series
Sitting Apart
Handling Slides
Classroom Videos
Latin
Superscript and Subscript
Schlepping Gear
Late Hours
Expensive Machines
Communicating Sans Steno
Cash Flow
Lag
Summer
Test Nerves
Ergonomics
Speech Recognition, Part I
Speech Recognition, Part II
Speech Recognition, Part III
Speech Recognition, Part IV

I promised this a while back, and now I'm finally making good. My experiences with CARTing two semesters of second-year Latin!

CART PROBLEM: CARTing a class with a significant amount of spoken Latin

Many stenographers use a bit of canned Latin in their work, from "amicus curiae" and "non compos mentis" on the legal side of the business to "nihil per os" and "status epilepticus" on the medical side. But it's easy enough to define common words and phrases in a steno dictionary. It's a bit trickier to build up a toolbox of word parts and suffixes that can be used to deal with new Latin words coming up at the spur of the moment. I did have a few advantages starting out, though:

* Unlike most foreign language classes, Latin classes tend not to be taught in an immersion environment. Rather than encouraging conversational fluency, they're usually focused on comprehending a specific Latin text, and the majority of the words spoken in the class are in English.

* I had taken two years of high school Latin and one year of college Latin (not to brag or anything, but I got summa cum laude on the National Latin Exam both times I took it), and I'd even done a little Latin tutoring along the way, so even though it had been quite a few years since I'd studied the subject, I still had a fair amount of vocabulary in the dusty corners of my memory.

* Both the first-semester professor and the second-semester professor were very good about writing new vocabulary on the board.

* The texts used in both classes were readily available -- one in a slim textbook that I bought from the college bookstore for $20, and one online, which I bought for $10 from the Kindle store and was able to read on my phone. Public domain texts make for much cheaper book prices.

* Latin is a pretty phonetic language -- much more so than English. Once you have the tricky stuff down (such as "v is pronounced like w" and "-um endings are elided in poetry when the next word starts with a vowel"), you're able to write a lot of words by sound, even if you've never heard them before and have no idea what they mean.

But even so, it was among the more challenging subjects to CART. Two things were absolutely invaluable, and I never would have been able to get through the class without them:

* Fast, solid fingerspelling skills. I think that the only way to be a really efficient fingerspeller is to simplify one's fingerspelling alphabet as much as possible. My lowercase alphabet is just the asterisk plus the left hand alphabet, and my uppercase alphabet is the asterisk, the left hand alphabet, and the right hand P. This means that my index and middle fingers bear the brunt of the activity, while my ring and pinky finger -- the two weaker fingers of the hand -- can stay out of it. Cutting down on the number of keys required to hit each letter also helps a lot with speed and accuracy. Many people are taught left hand alphabet plus RBGS for lowercase fingerspelling, and I think that's a terrible mistake. When I tried it, I'd constantly be misstroking, dropping keys, pounding, and losing speed, all because I had to coordinate four fingers on the right hand side instead of just one. Changing to left hand alphabet plus asterisk was a revelation.

* Being able to define new words from the writer. I intend to write an entire post on this (possibly with a screencast showing how I do it), but let me just say that I use it constantly, not just in this class, but in any class with a lot of vocabulary that can't always be predicted by scanning through prep materials beforehand. The first time the professor says a word like "hendecasyllable" or "Aemilianus", he usually slows down and gives students a chance to write the word in their notebooks. That's your chance to define it by stroking out the way you want to write it, highlighting those (almost certainly mistranlated) strokes, fingerspelling the definition, and adding it to your job dictionary. It's vital to be able to do this from the writer, because having to reach over to the laptop keyboard -- even assuming it's in reach, which isn't often true, since you've hopefully positioned it for greatest visibility from your student's perspective rather than yours -- adds several seconds to the task, which might mean that the Professor starts speaking again before you're done defining it. Some people might be tempted not to define it, and just to fingerspell it each time, but keep in mind that after the first mention of the name, the professor isn't going to pause for it anymore. It'll be inserted into the middle of a sentence without any consideration for how long it takes to fingerspell. Much better to define it the first time and then have it in your pocket every time it comes up from then on.

Those were the main tools I used constantly, but several other tricks made the class much easier as well.

* I've heard a lot of people talk about making sure they had lots of syllabic word parts to build on, but honestly I found fingerspelling more useful in most cases, partly because Eclipse used English spelling rules rather than Latin spelling rules for root words with inflections. So when the name "Montanus" came up, for instance, if I had written "mon", glued it to "tan", and then added "-us", it would have been spelled Montannus instead. So often it was better just to fingerspell the entire thing and define it as a whole rather than leaving it to the mercy of Eclipse's spelling algorithm. When I knew that the algorithm wasn't likely to indiscriminately double a letter, though, I did have some common case endings at the ready:

OS = {^os}
O*RPL = {^orum}
A RE = {^are}
AS = {^as}
A*PBD = {^and}
A*RPL = {^arum}
PHA PHUS = {^mamus}
KWROR = {^ior}
KWROE = {^io}
KWRO*R = {^eor}
KWRA = {^a}
KWRA* = {^ia}
KWRAOUS = {^ius}
SKWRUS = {^us}
SKWRUPL = {^um}
SKWREU = {^i}
SKWREUS = {^is}
SKWRA = {^a}
SKWRAOEU = {^ae}

* I also defined some common pedagogical phrases, such as:

KWEU KWAOEU KWOD = qui-quae-quod
HEUBG HAOEUBG HOBG = hic-haec-hoc
US A UPL = us-a-um
EUS AEU KWRA EUD = is-ea-id
KAOUS KAOUS KAOUS = cuius-cuius-cuius (not to be confused with KAOUS KAOUS = couscous)

And, of course, grammatical terms like subjunctive, gerundive, participle, pluperfect, periphrastic, protasis, apodosis, et cetera.

* Most of the class, though, consisted of students reading Latin passages from their textbook and then translating. Fortunately it wasn't necessary for me either to write all the Latin on the fly or to program the entire textbook into my dictionary, because my student was perfectly able to follow along with her classmates in the book, as long as I gave her the first few words and last few words of each passage. So the transcript would look like this:

MALE STUDENT: Obstabatque aliis...
(reading)
Habentia pondus.

* Having the book on my phone was very practical; I liked it better than the paper textbook, because I could turn pages with the touch of a finger, which minimized the amount of time my hands had to leave the keys. I could also make the font size as big as I liked, and if I lost my place I could search for it quickly by just tapping in the first few letters of a word.

The student was very grateful for my efforts in the class, and she actually gave me preference in her other classes over another CART provider because she was so happy with how well I'd done with the Latin. I really enjoyed CARTing it, because it brought back such good memories of studying the language when I was younger. And more than that, it was just fun to have the challenge of CARTing in a language other than English. If I'd been in a conversational language class, I probably would have been out of my depth, but the relatively slow pace of Latin as it's taught to college students allowed me to hone my fingerspelling and dictionary definition skills while obliging me to dredge up long-forgotten vocabulary words from the lower recesses of my mind. It was a huge amount of fun, and I hope I'll get a chance to try it again someday.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Updated Articles Page

Hi, all! I'll be writing another CART Problem Solving post tomorrow as scheduled, but I just wanted to let you know that I've updated the articles page on StenoKnight.com. It now includes the transcript of my CEU presentation on What ASL Interpreters Should Know About Captioning from That Keith Wann Show last Wednesday, as well as a few other interviews and articles that I just got around to posting to the page, such as two articles on mobile CART, my OpenSource.com article on Plover, and my new interactive steno demo page for people interested in trying out this steno thing for themselves, using a regular computer keyboard. As I write new articles, I'll try to keep that page updated more consistently, so stay tuned for more.

Monday, February 20, 2012

CART Problem Solving: Classroom Videos

CART Problem Solving Series

Sitting Apart
Handling Slides
Classroom Videos
Latin
Superscript and Subscript
Schlepping Gear
Late Hours
Expensive Machines
Communicating Sans Steno
Cash Flow
Lag
Summer
Test Nerves
Ergonomics
Speech Recognition, Part I
Speech Recognition, Part II
Speech Recognition, Part III
Speech Recognition, Part IV

Wow, I only have 15 minutes before midnight. Well, I hope you guys will forgive me if today's weekly CART problem goes a bit over the Monday deadline. Three of my four schools were closed today, but one was still open, so I CARTed one three-hour class; prepped a play script for a theater captioning colleague; helped another colleague test his StreamText setup (for That Keith Wann Show this Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. EST, which he'll be captioning because I'll be presenting a CEU lecture on what ASL Interpreters should know about CART); completed my last bout in the Typeracer Championship; answered some Plover email; and emailed a first-time client with details about tomorrow's gig. Then, after this blog post, I just have to transcribe a 37-minute ophthalmology interview, and then I can do the dishes and go to bed. Gotta be up at 7:00 tomorrow for a morning class. Phew! It's been a lovely day, but a busy one. Okay, on to the problem.

CART PROBLEM:Videos shown in class don't always have captions.

This is a complex problem, with a variety of solutions. Here are some of the ways I deal with the various options this problem presents; if you have additional solutions, please feel free to add them in the comments.

* If the professor is playing a DVD, it's usually easy to solve. If it's an unscheduled video, just discreetly approach them and ask them to turn on the captions or subtitles. Most (though not all) commercial DVDs offer this as an option. Of course, it's best if you can ask the professor at the beginning of the semester whether they're planning to show any videos; that way they can know to turn the captions on without having to be asked at the beginning of the class in question, which can make the deaf student feel conspicuous. They might also be able to bring in the captioned DVD as opposed to just using a ripped disc image hosted on the university's server (which usually won't have the caption code embedded), or they might be able to get a DVD from the college's media library rather than using an old uncaptioned VHS copy. Not all professors are knowledgeable about how captions work, so it's best if you can have a brief but informative conversation well in advance about their best options for locating captioned versions of the media they're planning to show.

* If the professor is playing a web video rather than a DVD, it might have captions too, though unfortunately this is less likely than a DVD version. If it's a TED talk, you're in luck -- virtually all of their videos are captioned. If it's a YouTube video, it's definitely worth checking to see if someone's captioned it, but beware of using the "autocaption" feature. It's almost always much more confusing than it is helpful. I've got more information on YouTube's autocaptions here.

* If the professor schedules an otherwise uncaptioned web video in advance or assigns it as homework, you can use Universal Subtitles to caption it in offline, like I did with a video assigned in a Psychology class last fall. Then you can just give the URL to the student (if the video was assigned for homework) or to the professor (if the video is going to be shown in class). This is a fantastic option as long as the video is hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, or USTREAM. If it isn't, though, you might be out of luck. And one unfortunate downside to Universal Subtitles is that when the video is maximized the subtitles disappear, so some professors might be a bit put out by having to display their video in a window. I asked them to support fullscreen videos last year, but so far no luck. Maybe someday.

* If the video was originally broadcast on PBS, there's a good chance that even if the video isn't captioned, the transcript might be available online. The other day a professor announced at the beginning of class that he would be showing a Frontline documentary for most of the session, and a quick Google search on my phone revealed that the transcript was available online. I ran and plugged in my 4G modem and external keyboard, brought up the transcript, and blew up the browser window's font size for easy legibility. Then I was able to sit back for most of the class, my external qwerty keyboard resting in my lap while my laptop remained on top of its tripod in front of the student. All I had to do was follow along with the soundtrack and hit "page down" at regular intervals. Not quite as good as captions, of course. Since the words weren't on the screen, the student was forced to glance back and forth between the video and the laptop screen, which made the process a bit more awkward than it could have been. Still, for a spur-of-the-moment solution, it worked quite well.

*Finally, if worse comes to worst, and none of the other options are available, you might just have to CART the video. This is less than ideal for a number of reasons, though I'm sorry to say it's probably the option I wind up using most often, just because professors are sometimes hard to pin down in terms of what they'll be showing throughout the semester, and it can be very difficult to get any advance notice, much less specific details of what video they'll be showing when. So when I have to, I just write what I hear, as if it were anything else spoken in the classroom. As with the previous solution, this forces students to constantly look back and forth between the video screen and the laptop screen, which can cause eyestrain and frustration.

Additionally, since I won't have had time to put in speaker designations, I'm basically only able to indicate each new speaker with chevrons, like this:

>> And then I said to him...

as opposed to this:

QUEEN ELIZABETH: And then I said to him...

If there's a lot of voice-over narration or offscreen dialogue, this can get somewhat confusing. Also, some videos involve extremely rapid rates of speech. Ordinary speech tends to contain regular pauses; when a speaker stops to think, breathe, or consult their notes, that gives CART providers a little wiggle room to define unfamiliar terminology in our dictionaries or finish writing the last few trailing words, so that we're able to jump right in when the speaker starts again. When people read from a book or script, or when a video is edited to be constantly snappy and fast-paced, those breaths and pauses are cut out, and we're forced to ramp up our speed accordingly, which means there's less time to correct any errors that might slip through. Consequently, it's always better to use pre-prepared captions if at all possible. When they're not an option, it's just you and your machine. If the video is available online or in the University's library, explain to your student that you'll do your very best to get everything on the fly, but if a few words wind up slipping past you, you'll fill in the blanks when you're editing the transcript later that day. Most students are pretty understanding. Don't be offended if they choose to focus on the video screen rather than the laptop screen during class; they might be absorbing the visuals while using their residual hearing to get a sense of the soundtrack, which they'll fill in more completely afterwards using your transcript.

Have I missed anything? Have you run up against an entirely different use of classroom video? I'm curious to hear how other people handle these problems. I've heard that some universities actually have staff dedicated to captioning videos used by professors, but none of the universities I've worked for have provided that service. I'm hoping someday to offer my clients a pair of caption glasses, so that when I'm forced to CART a video in class they won't have to keep changing their focus from the laptop screen to the video screen; the captions will just be superimposed on the moving image. But as far as I can tell, those glasses aren't commercially available for individual CART providers yet. Someday soon, I'm hoping. In the mean time, a varied assortment of more or less workable solutions to a perennial academic problem. Feel free to add your own.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

CCAC Newsletter and Mobile CART

The first edition of the CCAC Newsletter is online! And it's got an interview with me about my mobile CART rig on page 4. I'm still intending to go over that in more detail on this blog (hopefully with lots of pictures or maybe even a video), but if you're interested in the basics, click through and check it out!

Monday, February 13, 2012

CART Problem Solving: Handling Slides in Remote Work

CART Problem Solving Series

Sitting Apart
Handling Slides
Classroom Videos
Latin
Superscript and Subscript
Schlepping Gear
Late Hours
Expensive Machines
Communicating Sans Steno
Cash Flow
Lag
Summer
Test Nerves
Ergonomics
Speech Recognition, Part I
Speech Recognition, Part II
Speech Recognition, Part III
Speech Recognition, Part IV

CART PROBLEM: A remote CART class involves many detailed PowerPoint slides.

I'm currently providing CART for a medical student in his second year of medical school. The school is located outside of the US, so he wasn't able to find an onsite CART provider, though he does have two onsite ASL interpreters there to help with his lab and clinical classes. Fortunately the classroom has an excellent AV system with wired broadband internet access; they record videos of all lectures for the students to use while studying, so I'm able to get crystal clear audio, direct from the professor's microphone. This alone cuts down on a lot of the issues I usually have to contend with when providing remote CART. But, of course, since I'm not in the room, I can't just look to the front of the class to see the explanatory slides used to accompany each lecture. The school is very good about providing me with those slides -- sometimes in PowerPoint format, sometimes in PDF -- at least a few days before each class, so I can use them to prep my dictionary with all the difficult medical terminology ahead of time. Even so, it can sometimes be difficult to follow the lecture without the images and diagrams being referred to, and occasionally it's difficult to make out what a professor's saying, especially if they have a non-standard accent, unless I'm able to see the word written down in front of me.

This is what I did to compensate for not being able to see the slides as they're projected to the students in the actual classroom:

* I downloaded a program called Autohotkey.

* I already owned a Vpedal from my days as a transcriptionist, so all I had to do was write a very simple Autohotkey script containing the following two entries:

Joy2::Send {Click}{PgDn}
Joy1::Send {PgUp}

That made it so that, whenever I ran Autohotkey, my foot pedal would send a mouseclick and then a pagedown command to whatever was located under the mouse cursor.

* I set up a second monitor (you can see it in my home office photo) next to my laptop, and I always make sure to position the mouse cursor somewhere in the real estate controlled by the second monitor before every class.

* The beauty of this setup is that my proprietary steno software can be set to "top window"; it takes focus from any other window as soon as I start writing. But with a click of my foot pedal, the mouse cursor refocuses the window to the slide, presses page down (which advances one slide in both Adobe Reader and PowerPoint, so it doesn't matter which format the slides are in), and then my steno software is free to take the focus back a second later. If I want to scroll up, I just need to scroll down one page to get focus, and then I can use the pedal's other button to send the "page up" command as many times as I like.

* When the class is over, I turn off Autohotkey, and the pedal automatically turns back into a controller for Winamp, the audio software I use in my transcription work. It couldn't be easier! Ever since setting this up, I've had no fear of anatomical diagrams or dense, fast-paced pharmacology lectures. Having the slides for reference has increased my accuracy and confidence enormously. The foot pedal allows my hands to stay on the keyboard, so I'm able to keep writing throughout, never missing a beat. It's been absolutely invaluable, and I recommend it to any remote providers who are lucky enough to get lecture slides before each class. The extra monitor and foot pedal are a small price to pay for the convenience of being able to navigate through the lecture with a tap of your toe.

Monday, February 6, 2012

CART Problem Solving

CART Problem Solving Series

Sitting Apart
Handling Slides
Classroom Videos
Latin
Superscript and Subscript
Schlepping Gear
Late Hours
Expensive Machines
Communicating Sans Steno
Cash Flow
Lag
Summer
Test Nerves
Ergonomics
Speech Recognition, Part I
Speech Recognition, Part II
Speech Recognition, Part III
Speech Recognition, Part IV

This poor blog has been lying fallow while I've been focusing on The Plover Project and keeping busy with all my CART, medical journal transcription, and theater captioning work, but this week I was just informed that one of my CART clients had dropped a class, leaving me with six more hours in my weekly schedule than I had anticipated. In order to put them to good use, I've decided to start a new series on this blog: CART Problem Solving, weekly discussions of various issues that come up in the daily life of a CART provider, and how I've tried to handle them. Some solutions are more satisfying than others, but they're all real-life issues that I've experienced in my work over the past several years. I've already drawn up a list of 10 CART problems on my hard drive, and I've just set a weekly reminder in Remember the Milk to post a problem with its solution to this blog every Monday. I had a pretty good track record the last time I gave myself a rigorous schedule on this blog (the NatCapVidMo Project), so I'm hoping this will be just the incentive I need to get it going again. Okay, let's do the first one!

CART PROBLEM: A CART client doesn't want to sit next to the CART provider.

This problem came up for me at the beginning of the semester, for the class I do every Monday morning. The client is a freshman, and he feels self-conscious when he has to sit next to a total stranger with a laptop on a tripod and lots of other weird, conspicuous equipment. He needs the CART to perform well in the class, but his embarrassment was so great that he asked me to sit far away from him on the first day, and told me he'd just read the transcript when I sent it to him that evening. I complied, but when I looked over I could see him straining to understand what the professor was saying. I knew that just reading the transcript after the fact wasn't enough for him to get the full benefit from the class. He needed to have the words in front of him as they were being said, so that he could interact with the professor and the other students in realtime as the class went on. I noticed that he had his laptop with him, so at the end of class I asked him if he would like me to send the realtime feed to his laptop during the next class. He agreed enthusiastically, so when I sent him the morning's transcript I also emailed him a URL he could use to access the CART feed using his web browser. The next week, I set up my computer in the front of the class (near a power outlet, another advantage for me; the student liked sitting in the back, away from all the outlets) and plugged in my 4G wireless modem. Then I started a job on StreamText, with a job name corresponding to the URL I had given him. He logged into the chat room, which let me know that he was present in the classroom (it's a class of over 100 students in a very wide room, and I didn't want to make him come all the way over to check in with me in person, but the disability office doesn't want me to write unless the student is present, so that there isn't an incentive to just read the transcripts instead of showing up every day.) Since I was sitting in the front of the room, I could hear the professor and all the other students very clearly, and he was able to hang out in the back with his laptop, looking just like every other plugged-in freshman in the room.

Some remote CART companies offer this problem as a reason for a university to contract with remote rather than onsite providers, but as you can see, I'm able to offer all the advantages of remote CART:

* Letting the student blend in with their peers
* Letting the student sit wherever they want in the room
* Giving the student a realtime transcript that lets them scroll backward and forwards at will

without any of the disadvantages, such as:

* The inability to hear anyone in the classroom other than the person wearing the microphone (usually the professor, though sometimes remote CART classes use the student's laptop microphone, which usually results in terribly substandard audio quality).
* Lack of access to PowerPoint slides and other visual cues present in the classroom.
* Data disruptions caused by spotty Wi-Fi signals. (Streamtext is very low-bandwidth, so it tends to be quite stable, unlike the higher bandwidth VOIP applications usually used to send audio to the remote provider, which can cut out, fuzz up, or disconnect unpredictably.)

This solution lets me provide the more consistent service that onsite CART is known for, while keeping a low profile and letting the student view the text discreetly on his own computer. Stay tuned next week for another CART problem and its corresponding CART solution!