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'm going to address today's CART problem over at The Plover Project Blog. It's a pretty simple one, and one that I've railed against for years, but I might have found some sort of workable solution for it.
CART PROBLEM: Steno Machines are too expensive.
This solution isn't intended to help out professionals. I own a professional machine (an Infinity Ergonomic), and I wouldn't part with it for anything. But even entry level steno machines cost over a thousand dollars, and it's seriously affecting the future of our profession. Why? Because buying one is too much of a financial risk for most people to take, especially considering the 85% average dropout rate of steno schools across the country. I firmly believe that unless it becomes as easy to dabble in steno as it is to take up any other computer-based activity (playing video games, writing software, composing music, et cetera) that the number of stenographers in this country and around the world will continue on its slow but steady trajectory downwards. Not enough people are giving it a try, and it's very hard to convince prospective CART providers, captioners, and court reporters of how fantastic our job can be when we require such a huge and non-refundable up front investment. The Plover Project is my way of giving the hobbyists, curiosity seekers, and would-be students a chance to try out this marvelous technology before they commit to it. The software is completely free, and the hardware costs only about $45, which is a much more reasonable amount for someone to lay out on a whim than $1,7500 (the sticker price of a new Stentura Protege). For more on this subject, please read my essay CART, Court, and Captioning.
I've recently made a pretty useful breakthrough in my quest to produce an efficient low-cost steno machine: I discovered how to make steno-style key toppers for the $45 keyboard. They cost only pennies to produce, and they give a much more natural feel to the keyboard, making it easier for new learners to switch their muscle memory from qwerty to steno. I've actually written pretty much all of this post (except for the HTML, because I haven't gotten around to putting angle brackets into my dictionary) on the qwerty keyboard with the new key toppers, and it's really not bad at all. Want to see how it all works? Read the post!
The Plover Blog: Towards an Affordable Steno Machine
Monday, March 26, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
CART Problem Solving: Late Hours
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
As you can see, I'm writing this at 4:00 in the morning. I did nine hours of CART today, with my first class starting at 8:00 a.m. (7:00 wake-up) and my last class ending at 9:00 p.m. I got groceries, came home around 10:30, helped make and eat dinner, sent off my daily transcripts, and then I had some medical journal transcription to do. Then I had to spend several hours trying to adjust my steno machine with my two hex wrenches to get rid of the annoying rattling noise the left hand keys had developed. It mostly worked. Then I practiced for the RMR, answered some emails, did a bit of recreational internet browsing, and now here I am, three hours before I've got to get up again. Because our work is so variable and so seasonal (summer work is especially hard to find), many CART providers try to cram as many hours into their schedules as they can in a given semester, so that they can put aside some money to live on during the slow times. But it can be tough to be out in the field for such a long stretch every day. I don't actually have a solution to this one, but I'd welcome suggestions from fellow providers and anyone else who might have ideas on how to make it easier. Other than utilizing every spare minute between classes to do the administrative stuff (like emails and transcription work), how do you manage to balance a jam-packed CART schedule with the rest of your life, including sleep, household tasks, and time for the stuff that makes all the hard work worth it?
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
As you can see, I'm writing this at 4:00 in the morning. I did nine hours of CART today, with my first class starting at 8:00 a.m. (7:00 wake-up) and my last class ending at 9:00 p.m. I got groceries, came home around 10:30, helped make and eat dinner, sent off my daily transcripts, and then I had some medical journal transcription to do. Then I had to spend several hours trying to adjust my steno machine with my two hex wrenches to get rid of the annoying rattling noise the left hand keys had developed. It mostly worked. Then I practiced for the RMR, answered some emails, did a bit of recreational internet browsing, and now here I am, three hours before I've got to get up again. Because our work is so variable and so seasonal (summer work is especially hard to find), many CART providers try to cram as many hours into their schedules as they can in a given semester, so that they can put aside some money to live on during the slow times. But it can be tough to be out in the field for such a long stretch every day. I don't actually have a solution to this one, but I'd welcome suggestions from fellow providers and anyone else who might have ideas on how to make it easier. Other than utilizing every spare minute between classes to do the administrative stuff (like emails and transcription work), how do you manage to balance a jam-packed CART schedule with the rest of your life, including sleep, household tasks, and time for the stuff that makes all the hard work worth it?
Monday, March 12, 2012
CART Problem Solving: Schlepping the Gear
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: Steno equipment can be bulky to transport from job to job.
Many of my court reporting colleagues carry their equipment with them in a rolling suitcase, but since I live in Manhattan and work at three different onsite universities (plus another one remotely from my home office), I go most places via subway. It's shameful to say, but less than 20% of New York City subway stations are accessible -- that means to people in wheelchairs, parents with strollers, people with other mobility issues, and people carrying rolling suitcases. The elevators in the stations that have them are almost always terribly overcrowded, adding up to half an hour to a regular commute. I certainly didn't want to have to buy a car just to get to work (and New York City traffic is another headache entirely), so I figured that either I had to haul a giant heavy rolling suitcase up and down scads of stairs every morning (not much fun) or I had to get myself a huge, tough, ergonomically optimized backpack.
I've had three backpacks in the time that I've been CARTing professionally. The first was just a big general-purpose backpack with a laptop sleeve in the back and a big central pouch for everything else. I realized the impracticality of that one when I forgot my laptop's power cable while packing for a big open captioning event and I had to phone my partner in a panic to run it down to me at the last minute. Eep. After that I realized I needed to be able to keep track of my equipment at a glance, so I upgraded to a Quiksilver Grenade II, which was originally designed for skateboarders:
I put a different power cable in each of the side pockets and strapped my tripod case to the front where the skateboard was supposed to go. It let me tell whether I had all my cables by just looking at the pockets, but it was kind of annoying to have to unstrap my tripod case every time I wanted to get into the main compartment. So last year I bought a Tamrac 5550 from a photography store, and it turned out to be a massive improvement.
Because it's designed for professional photographers, it's got a dedicated tripod case strap at the bottom of the bag, which means no more strapping and unstrapping every time I want to open the bag. It's also got all these great partitions for each of my power cables and other accessories, so that I can tell instantly whether I've remembered to pack everything. It holds both my steno machine and my backup n-key rollover keyboard (for use with Plover), plus my laptop, my Q1 tablet, and lots of other stuff besides.
Here's what my gear looks like when I take it all out of the bag:
(from left to right)
Row one:
* Cyberlegs laptop tripod.
* Steno tripod.
* Gunmetal gray Infinity Ergonomic steno machine, on a vinyl zip case that I bought at some college bookstore.
* Lenovo Thinkpad Edge laptop with typewriter decal. That's my $3,000 Eclipse dongle sticking out of one of the right-side USB ports. I've got a Bluetooth dongle in the other.
Row two:
* Filco Majestouch Tenkeyless n-key rollover keyboard for use with Plover.
* Samsung Q1 tablet PC on its included black case.
Row three:
* Plover postcards.
* StenoKnight business cards.
Row four:
* Phone charger.
* Phone data cable.
* 15-foot extension cord wrapped around homemade spool (two cable catchers with the ends snipped off and a layer of foam core in between, held together with gaffer's tape).
* Q1 power cord.
* Steno machine charger.
* Laptop power cord.
* Kinesis Savant Elite foot pedal for transcription.
* Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones for transcription and remote CART.
Row five:
* USB hub.
* Surge protector with rotating plug head (very good for unpredictable outlet configurations in the field).
* Collapsible water bottle.
* USB to mini USB cable (for USB microphone and as backup steno machine connector if my Bluetooth ever stops working)
* Mini one-time-use superglue dispensers. (You never know when a random student will knock over your steno machine and a key will pop off. Yes, this has happened to me.)
* Towel tablets. So I always know where my towel is. I had five of these last week, but then a student put her wet umbrella on my chair five minutes before class started.
* A pencil case to keep all this little stuff in. I make sure that the superglue dispensers are in a different pencil case from the one containing expensive stuff like my modem and my Leatherman.
* My ID badge from the first time I captioned at the United Nations. I keep it as a kind of good luck charm, I guess.
* My Leatherman, on top of the other pencil case. Good for last minute repairs that superglue and gaffer's tape can't handle.
Row six:
* My 4G USB Modem. Believe it or not, this thing is fast enough for remote CART (about 10 Mbps download, 2 Mbps upload), and it's also very useful when working on campuses that don't give their CART providers Wi-Fi access.
* Expresscard to serial port converter. I basically only use this when I'm writing to LED signs or doing theater captioning.
* USB to Serial converter. This is the most reliable of its kind that I've seen, but still not as reliable as Bluetooth or the Expresscard. Basically a last resort backup method. I don't carry a serial cable when I'm not doing theater captioning, so obviously I don't use this in my regular CART work.
* Spray-on screen cleaner and microfiber cloth.
* Tiny hex wrenches for adjusting my steno machine.
* USB microphone for remote work.
Not pictured: My homemade gaffer's tape spool, which is basically just a 4-inch length of plastic shelf divider with a bunch of gaffer's tape wrapped around it.
And this is what it looks like when it's all put back in there:
It only weighs about 26 pounds, and the chest and abdomen straps keep my back from aching when I'm hiking around the city. I'm interested to hear about any other stenographers who've chosen to go the backpack route rather than the rolling suitcase route. What do you carry around and what do you leave behind? Are you able to carry at least two computers, in case one crashes? What about steno machines? Feel free to weigh in (ideally with pictures!) in the comments.
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: Steno equipment can be bulky to transport from job to job.
Many of my court reporting colleagues carry their equipment with them in a rolling suitcase, but since I live in Manhattan and work at three different onsite universities (plus another one remotely from my home office), I go most places via subway. It's shameful to say, but less than 20% of New York City subway stations are accessible -- that means to people in wheelchairs, parents with strollers, people with other mobility issues, and people carrying rolling suitcases. The elevators in the stations that have them are almost always terribly overcrowded, adding up to half an hour to a regular commute. I certainly didn't want to have to buy a car just to get to work (and New York City traffic is another headache entirely), so I figured that either I had to haul a giant heavy rolling suitcase up and down scads of stairs every morning (not much fun) or I had to get myself a huge, tough, ergonomically optimized backpack.
I've had three backpacks in the time that I've been CARTing professionally. The first was just a big general-purpose backpack with a laptop sleeve in the back and a big central pouch for everything else. I realized the impracticality of that one when I forgot my laptop's power cable while packing for a big open captioning event and I had to phone my partner in a panic to run it down to me at the last minute. Eep. After that I realized I needed to be able to keep track of my equipment at a glance, so I upgraded to a Quiksilver Grenade II, which was originally designed for skateboarders:
I put a different power cable in each of the side pockets and strapped my tripod case to the front where the skateboard was supposed to go. It let me tell whether I had all my cables by just looking at the pockets, but it was kind of annoying to have to unstrap my tripod case every time I wanted to get into the main compartment. So last year I bought a Tamrac 5550 from a photography store, and it turned out to be a massive improvement.
Because it's designed for professional photographers, it's got a dedicated tripod case strap at the bottom of the bag, which means no more strapping and unstrapping every time I want to open the bag. It's also got all these great partitions for each of my power cables and other accessories, so that I can tell instantly whether I've remembered to pack everything. It holds both my steno machine and my backup n-key rollover keyboard (for use with Plover), plus my laptop, my Q1 tablet, and lots of other stuff besides.
Here's what my gear looks like when I take it all out of the bag:
(from left to right)
Row one:
* Cyberlegs laptop tripod.
* Steno tripod.
* Gunmetal gray Infinity Ergonomic steno machine, on a vinyl zip case that I bought at some college bookstore.
* Lenovo Thinkpad Edge laptop with typewriter decal. That's my $3,000 Eclipse dongle sticking out of one of the right-side USB ports. I've got a Bluetooth dongle in the other.
Row two:
* Filco Majestouch Tenkeyless n-key rollover keyboard for use with Plover.
* Samsung Q1 tablet PC on its included black case.
Row three:
* Plover postcards.
* StenoKnight business cards.
Row four:
* Phone charger.
* Phone data cable.
* 15-foot extension cord wrapped around homemade spool (two cable catchers with the ends snipped off and a layer of foam core in between, held together with gaffer's tape).
* Q1 power cord.
* Steno machine charger.
* Laptop power cord.
* Kinesis Savant Elite foot pedal for transcription.
* Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones for transcription and remote CART.
Row five:
* USB hub.
* Surge protector with rotating plug head (very good for unpredictable outlet configurations in the field).
* Collapsible water bottle.
* USB to mini USB cable (for USB microphone and as backup steno machine connector if my Bluetooth ever stops working)
* Mini one-time-use superglue dispensers. (You never know when a random student will knock over your steno machine and a key will pop off. Yes, this has happened to me.)
* Towel tablets. So I always know where my towel is. I had five of these last week, but then a student put her wet umbrella on my chair five minutes before class started.
* A pencil case to keep all this little stuff in. I make sure that the superglue dispensers are in a different pencil case from the one containing expensive stuff like my modem and my Leatherman.
* My ID badge from the first time I captioned at the United Nations. I keep it as a kind of good luck charm, I guess.
* My Leatherman, on top of the other pencil case. Good for last minute repairs that superglue and gaffer's tape can't handle.
Row six:
* My 4G USB Modem. Believe it or not, this thing is fast enough for remote CART (about 10 Mbps download, 2 Mbps upload), and it's also very useful when working on campuses that don't give their CART providers Wi-Fi access.
* Expresscard to serial port converter. I basically only use this when I'm writing to LED signs or doing theater captioning.
* USB to Serial converter. This is the most reliable of its kind that I've seen, but still not as reliable as Bluetooth or the Expresscard. Basically a last resort backup method. I don't carry a serial cable when I'm not doing theater captioning, so obviously I don't use this in my regular CART work.
* Spray-on screen cleaner and microfiber cloth.
* Tiny hex wrenches for adjusting my steno machine.
* USB microphone for remote work.
Not pictured: My homemade gaffer's tape spool, which is basically just a 4-inch length of plastic shelf divider with a bunch of gaffer's tape wrapped around it.
And this is what it looks like when it's all put back in there:
It only weighs about 26 pounds, and the chest and abdomen straps keep my back from aching when I'm hiking around the city. I'm interested to hear about any other stenographers who've chosen to go the backpack route rather than the rolling suitcase route. What do you carry around and what do you leave behind? Are you able to carry at least two computers, in case one crashes? What about steno machines? Feel free to weigh in (ideally with pictures!) in the comments.
Monday, March 5, 2012
CART Problem Solving: Superscript and Subscript
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
By a funny coincidence, the next thing on my list of CART problems was:
CART PROBLEM: A math class uses symbols not included in the software's default font.
And just this morning I got a question on my Formspring page asking about the very same subject! It's a sign. I answered it there this morning, but I thought I'd copy over my response here and flesh it out a little bit for completeness's sake.
So the questioner asked:
I am a CART provider at a major university. I'm finding the math functionality on all the major CAT softwares inadequate. I'm curious, what software do you use? Do you have suggestions on how to superscript and/or subscript?
And I responded:
I agree. Commercial steno software is terrible at math. Eventually I hope that Plover will help solve this (http://ploversteno.org), but until it's ready for primetime, I use the Chemistry Serif font and define all the digits between zero and nine independently. ("SA*UB 1" as subscript 1, "SAO*UP 1" as superscript 1, etc.) It's a bit of a pain, but it more or less gets the job done. I have one specific math profile set to Chemistry serif so I don't have to use it for all my classes.
Then later in the day another questioner followed up with:
Can you be a bit more specific? So if you are doing X squared, you are using a "control" stroke to make the 2 a subscript. Does it confuse you not to write what you hear? X squared or X to the 4th. I guess that's what I am struggling with. How to "hear it" and write it. Does that make sense? Or am I making this too hard.
I figured an illustration might help. Here's a composite of what the entries look like in the dictionary, with a section of what they look like in the actual user profile (the student preferred silver text on blue background) pasted below:
You can see that the characters look very strange in Eclipse's dictionary manager, because the font used in the dictionary manager doesn't map properly to the characters used in the Chemistry Serif font. But in the actual user profile, the font comes out very well, and doesn't look half bad. Oh, I mentioned in the answer that I had used SA*OUP to stand in for "superscript", but here you can see that I actually used P-R (for "to the power of") instead. I think I switched from one to the other at some point and didn't remember the change when I answered the question this morning. I haven't actually used this profile for about a year, since I last had to CART a "Math for Economists" class. But it's good to know that I have it in reserve for when I need it again.
I know this still might be a bit confusing, so if you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to ask! This is all very much a kludge; since Eclipse is designed as court reporting software rather than CART software, it really isn't equipped to deal with situations like this. But I think it's a pretty workable solution, and it's served me pretty well so far.
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
By a funny coincidence, the next thing on my list of CART problems was:
CART PROBLEM: A math class uses symbols not included in the software's default font.
And just this morning I got a question on my Formspring page asking about the very same subject! It's a sign. I answered it there this morning, but I thought I'd copy over my response here and flesh it out a little bit for completeness's sake.
So the questioner asked:
I am a CART provider at a major university. I'm finding the math functionality on all the major CAT softwares inadequate. I'm curious, what software do you use? Do you have suggestions on how to superscript and/or subscript?
And I responded:
I agree. Commercial steno software is terrible at math. Eventually I hope that Plover will help solve this (http://ploversteno.org), but until it's ready for primetime, I use the Chemistry Serif font and define all the digits between zero and nine independently. ("SA*UB 1" as subscript 1, "SAO*UP 1" as superscript 1, etc.) It's a bit of a pain, but it more or less gets the job done. I have one specific math profile set to Chemistry serif so I don't have to use it for all my classes.
Then later in the day another questioner followed up with:
Can you be a bit more specific? So if you are doing X squared, you are using a "control" stroke to make the 2 a subscript. Does it confuse you not to write what you hear? X squared or X to the 4th. I guess that's what I am struggling with. How to "hear it" and write it. Does that make sense? Or am I making this too hard.
I figured an illustration might help. Here's a composite of what the entries look like in the dictionary, with a section of what they look like in the actual user profile (the student preferred silver text on blue background) pasted below:
You can see that the characters look very strange in Eclipse's dictionary manager, because the font used in the dictionary manager doesn't map properly to the characters used in the Chemistry Serif font. But in the actual user profile, the font comes out very well, and doesn't look half bad. Oh, I mentioned in the answer that I had used SA*OUP to stand in for "superscript", but here you can see that I actually used P-R (for "to the power of") instead. I think I switched from one to the other at some point and didn't remember the change when I answered the question this morning. I haven't actually used this profile for about a year, since I last had to CART a "Math for Economists" class. But it's good to know that I have it in reserve for when I need it again.
I know this still might be a bit confusing, so if you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to ask! This is all very much a kludge; since Eclipse is designed as court reporting software rather than CART software, it really isn't equipped to deal with situations like this. But I think it's a pretty workable solution, and it's served me pretty well so far.
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.
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.
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.
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