Constructing "computer-compatible" stenographers: The transition to real-time transcription in courtroom reporting

Technology and Culture

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-26

  Downey, Greg ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

^b University of Wisconsin   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645930054     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2006.0068     Document Type: Article

References (156)

1. "Pioneering in Stenotypy and the Coming of the Age of Stenotype: An Interview with Walter W. Heironimus," in National Shorthand Reporters Association (NSRA), Celebrating Our Heritage: Diamond Jubilee Convention, August 1976 (Arlington, Va., 1976), 40-43.
2. The term "stenotype" was originally a brand name, but eventually came to mean all mechanical steno-writer machines. For an internalist history of court reporting, see National Court Reporters Association (NCRA), "From Cave Painting to Real Time: 100 Years of the NCRA," Journal of Court Reporting (hereafter JCR), July-August 1999 (special commemorative issue).
3. Susan Wollenweber, "Real-time Reporting: Making Instant Transcription Work for You," Trial, July 1995, 68;
4. Ben Rogner, "The O. J. Simpson Trial Reporters Tell Their Story," JCR, January 1996, 35-36;
5. Patrick Rogers and Lyndon Stambler, "Paper Tigers," People, 12 June 1995, 85-86.
6. On the feminization of clerical labor in the United States, see Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930 (Urbana, 111., 1992).
7. On gender in the history of technology, see Nina Lerman, Arwen Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, "The Shoulders We Stand On and the View from Here: Historiography and Directions for Research," Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 9-30.
8. Technological innovator sources include research descriptions from technical journals and conferences (e.g., IBM Journal of Research and Development, IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, Broadcast Engineering) and business analyses from trade journals and newspapers (e.g., Computerworld, Computer Design, New York Times), as well as advertising in court-reporting journals (e.g., Transcript, National Shorthand Reporter, Journal of Court Reporting). Court-manager sources include letters and articles from professional journals (e.g., Trial, State Court Journal) and studies and reports from official associations (e.g., National Center for State Courts, Federal Judicial Center, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration). Court-reporter sources include articles, editorials, and letters printed in professional journals (listed above), published memoirs, student-training manuals, and proceedings and reports from professional associations (National Shorthand Reporters Association, National Court Reporters Association). Sources from the deaf/hard-of-hearing community include association journals (Volta Review, Deaf American, American Annals of the Deaf) and conference reports (Gallaudet University, National Association of the Deaf). Government investigations and reports (e.g., Occupational Outlook Quarterly) round out the data sources.
9. On labor in the history of technology, see Philip Scranton, "None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology," Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 722-43.
10. On professionalization, see Andrew D. Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988).
11. On labor automation, see Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981 (Baltimore, 2000).
12. On cold war science and technology, see Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York, 1993).
13. On standardization, see Amy Slaton and Janet Abbate, "The Hidden Lives of Standards: Technical Prescriptions and the Transformation of Work in America," in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 95-144.
14. On information labor, see Greg Downey, "The Place of Labor in the History of Information Technology Revolutions," in Uncovering Labor in Information Revolutions, 1750-2000, ed. Aad Blok and Greg Downey (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 225-61.
15. John J. Murtha, "Dictating...Then and Now," National Shorthand Reporter (here-after NSR), June 1965, 374-77;
16. Alfred Stern, "The Reporter and the Stenotype Note Reader," NSR, May 1967, 20-21.
17. On office dictation equipment, see David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000).
18. On office stenography, see Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930 (Philadelphia, 1990).
19. Before the use of dictation equipment, court reporters would often dictate to two live typists at once; see Horace A. Edgecomb, "The Changed Conditions in the Professional Shorthand Field," in Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Convention of the NSRA, ed. Horace A. Edgecomb (n.p., 1921), 102-29.
20. As early as 1930, census figures indicated that over 95 percent of the over 800,000 office stenographer-typists in the United States were women; see Alba M. Edwards, "Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870 to 1940," in 16th Census of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1943).
21. For an interesting midcentury sociological study of court reporting, see Morris L. Fried, "The Shorthand Reporter: A Study in Occupational Sociology" (Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 1964).
22. NSRA Committee on Computer-Aided Transcription, CAT Needs Assessment: Buying the Right CAT for You (Vienna, Va., 1985), 45.
23. J. Michael Greenwood and Douglas C. Dodge, Management of Court-Reporting Services (Denver, 1976), 33.
24. J. Michael Greenwood and Jerry R. Tollar, User's Guidebook to Computer-Aided Transcription (Williamsburg, Va., 1977), 4.
25. For more on the NCSC's efforts to find a more efficient method of transcription, see Robert A. Lowe and David C. Steelman, A Literature Search and Analysis of Evaluations of Alternative Court-Reporting Technologies (North Andover, Mass., 1988), 2.
26. As reported in a NCSC guidebook on evaluating CAT systems two years later; see J. Michael Greenwood and Jerry R. Tollar, Evaluation Guidebook to Computer-Aided Transcription (Denver, 1975), 1.
27. Alexander B. Aikman, "Measuring Court Reporter Income and Productivity," State Court Journal, winter 1979, 23.
28. Greenwood and Tollar, Evaluation Guidebook, 1.
29. Glenn J. Leathersich, "Alleviating the Court-Reporting Shortage," Junior College Journal, May 1972, 32;
30. Michael F. Crowley, "Employment Opportunities for Shorthand Reporters," Occupational Outlook Quarterly, December 1966, 28-30;
31. Edward J. Van Allen, Your Future as a Shorthand Reporter (New York, 1969).
32. Harry L. Libby, "Report of Survey of the Alaskan Courts System," NSR, January 1964, 137.
33. George Kraft, "Displacement by Sound?" NSR, March 1967, 13.
34. Sandra W. McFate, "Will Women Eventually Dominate Reporting?" NSR, December 1973, 13-14.
35. Warren Weaver, memorandum on machine translation, 16 July 1949;
36. reprinted as "Translation," in Readings in Machine Translation, ed. Sergei Nirenburg, Harold Somers, and Yorick Wilks (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 13-14.
37. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, "The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages," in Advances in Computers, vol. 1, ed. Franz L. Alt (New York, 1960); reprinted in Nirenburg, Somers, and Wilks, 45-76.
38. Erwin Reifler, "The Mechanical Determination of Meaning," in Machine Translation of Languages, ed. William N. Locke and A. Donald Booth (New York, 1955); reprinted in Nirenburg, Somers, and Wilks, 21.
39. Erwin Reifler, "Current Research at the University of Washington," in Proceedings of the National Symposium on Machine Translation Held at the University of California, Los Angeles, February 2-5, 1960, ed. H. P. Edmundson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961), 155-56;
40. Charles J. Bashe et al., IBM's Early Computers (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 565;
41. J. L. Craft, E. H. Goldman, and W. B. Strohm, "A Table Look-up Machine for Processing of Natural Languages," IBM Journal of Research and Development 5 (1961): 192-203.
42. Bashe et al., 565;
43. W. J. Hutchins, Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K., 1986), 66-67;
44. W. J. Hutchins, "Gilbert W. King and the USAF Translator," in Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers, ed. W. J. Hutchins (Amsterdam, 2000), 171, 175.
45. D. M. Bowers and M. B. Fisk, "The World's Fair Machine Translator," Computer Design, April 1965, 16-29;
46. National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, Automatic Language-Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC), Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (Washington, D.C., 1966), 111.
47. ALPAC, 64. Some were already shifting their rhetoric from "machine translation" to "machine aids to translation." See Reifler, "The Mechanical Determination of Meaning," 34,
48. and Bar-Hillel, "The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages," 46.
49. Gilbert King, "Functions Required of a Translation System," in Edmundson, 58;
50. L. A. Kamentsky and C. N. Liu, "Computer-Automated Design of Multifont Print Recognition Logic," IBM Journal of Research and Development 7 (1963): 2-13;
51. G. O. Tarnawsky and S. A. Walker, The IBM Russian-English Automatic Translation Program (Yorktown Heights, N.Y., 1964), 1.
52. Gerard Salton, "The Automatic Transcription of Machine Shorthand," Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference 16 (1959): 148-59.
53. Sandra W. McFate, "Computer Transcription Is on the Brink of Revolutionizing Court Reporting," NSR, March 1975, 16.
54. A second possibility entertained by King was that "there might be some way in which he could encode and decode the two languages syllable by syllable." Ed Phillipi, "Stenotype Tape to Finished Transcript via Computer, Pt. 1," NSR, May 1966, 4.
55. E. J. Galli, "The Stenowriter - A System for the Lexical Processing of Stenotypy," IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, EC 11 (1962): 187-99.
56. W. J. Hutchins, "ALPAC: The (In)Famous Report," MT News International, June 1996; reprinted in Nirenburg, Somers, and Wilks (n. 17 above), 131.
57. Not only were human translators readily available, ALPAC argued, but their cost and delay were both less than that of MT. ALPAC (n. 22 above), 11; W. J. Hutchins, "Machine Translation: A Brief History," in Concise History of the Language Sciences: From the Sumerians to the Cognitivists, ed. E. F. K. Koerner and R. E. Asher (Oxford, 1995), 431-45.
58. Cassie Lee Bichy and Monette Benoit, "Sharpening the Cutting Edge: From CAT to the Internet," JCR, August-September 1998, 56;
59. Stenocomp Inc., Philadelphia Court-Operated Computer-Aided Transcription Service Center (Washington, D.C., 1974), 7-8.
60. By 1964, King had moved to Itek, another defense-contracting company; see Jonathan E. Lewis, Spy Capitalism: Itek and the CIA (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 244.
61. The CIA apparently was interested in the Stenoform-English translator not for language-translation work (ALPAC had ended those dreams), but to make transcriptions of internal meetings more quickly available throughout the agency; see Joseph Hanion, "CIA Helps Develop Steno Tape Reader," Computerworld, 13 November 1968, 9.
62. This description is compiled from: Ed Phillipi, "Stenotype Tape to Finished Transcript via Computer, Pt. 3," NSR, July 1966, 5;
63. Michael Brentano, "A History of CAT: From the CIA to the CIC," NSR, July 1990, 24;
64. Doris O. Wong and Robert T. Wright, "Computer Transcripts," NSR, May 1967, 12;
65. William E. Hewitt and Jill Berman Levy, Computer-Aided Transcription: Current Technology and Court Applications (Williamsburg, Va., 1994), 20, 48.
66. Phillipi, "Stenotype Tape to Finished Transcript via Computer, Pt. 1" (n. 26 above), 10;
67. Phillipi, "Stenotype Tape to Finished Transcript via Computer, Pt. 3," 4-5.
68. Stenocomp Inc., Philadelphia Court-Operated Computer-Aided Transcription Service Center, 3;
69. David J. Saari, The Court and Free-Lance Reporter Profession: Improved Management Strategies (New York, 1988), 63.
70. The Stenocomp solution combined cassette-tape Stenograph keyboards with the new IBM 360/370 mainframe system. Word of such systems had already spread through the court-reporting community; in 1965, both Ed Phillipi, another former IBMer, and Gilbert King, still at Itek at the time, had spoken at different professional reporters' meetings about the CAT systems they hoped to create. Neither product came to pass. Phillipi, "Stenotype Tape to Finished Transcript via Computer, Pt. 1";
71. Irving Kosky, "Report of the Committee on Computer Transcription," Transcript, October 1971, 3.
72. Ernest H. Short et al., A Study of Court-Reporting Systems (Gaithersburg, Md., 1971);
73. Federal Judicial Center, "Computer Transcription Comes of Age," NSR, November 1974, 42;
74. Irving Kosky, "Report of the Committee on Computer Transcription," NSR, November 1973, 18.
75. Short et al., 21;
76. Joseph L. Ebersole, Improving Court-Reporting Services (Washington, D.C., 1972), 9.
77. Kosky, "Report of the Committee on Computer Transcription," NSR, November 1973, 4.
78. Irving Kosky, "Report of the Committee on Computer Transcription," Transcript, December 1972, 2-3; NSRA (n. 1 above), 67.
79. Irving Kosky, "Report of the Committee on Computer Transcription," NSR, November 1973, 20;
80. "CAT Arrives on the Stage," JCR, July-August 1999, 72-81 (here, 73);
81. McFate,"Computer Transcription" (n. 26 above), 17-18; Bichy and Benoit (n. 30 above), 58. All quotes are Nelson's. Nelson himself switched CAT vendors: presumably seeking better service and lower costs, in 1975 he abandoned Stenocomp for a new firm called BaronData, which was located much closer, in Santa Barbara, California.
82. Doris O. Wong, "The CAT Corner," NSR, June 1975, 24;
83. Greenwood and Tollar, User's Guidebook (n. 9 above), 1, 6, 27-29;
84. Greenwood and Tollar, Evaluation Guidebook (n. 10 above), 10, 43.
85. Greenwood and Tollar, User's Guidebook, xi.
86. Irving Kosky, "Report of the Committee on Computer Transcription," NSR, November 1973, 20.
87. Greenwood and Tollar, User's Guidebook, 63.
88. Greenwood and Tollar, User's Guidebook, Ibid., xi, 10.
89. Bichy and Benoit (n. 30 above), 59.
90. Greenwood and Tollar, User's Guidebook (n. 9 above), 32.
91. Martin Winkler, "Old Man Running Scared," NSR, June 1975, 25.
92. Federal Judicial Center (n. 34 above), 42.
93. Joseph O. Inquagiato, "Feeding the CAT," Transcript, December 1978, 18.
94. Ben Hyatt, "Computer-Aided Transcription: Questions and Answers," in Computer-Aided Transcription: An Introduction and Systems Analysis, ed. Jill Berman Wilson (Vienna, Va., 1981), 36.
95. Lester P. Kane, "Computer-Aided Transcription: Is It the Answer?" NSR, June 1976, 15.
96. Salvatore Rao, "The Future of CAT Reporters - A Dissenting Opinion," Transcript, June 1977, 11.
97. Grant E. Perry, "Computer-Aided Transcription: Genie in a Bottle or Pig in a Poke?" NSR, January 1976, 21.
98. William D. Mohr, "1994" NSR, May 1976, 30. As for the note readers, Mohr joked that "many of them became go-go dancers - even some of the female transcribers."
99. Alex Kacen, "The Latest Word about Shorthand Reporting," Occupational Outlook Quarterly, summer 1976, 8-9;
100. McFate, "Will Women Eventually Dominate Reporting?" (n. 16 above), 13-14.
101. Fried (n. 6 above), 33, n. 1.
102. Sandra W. McFate, "Men Wanted," NSR, February 1976,
103. and NSR, May 1976, letters in response.
104. Kerry L. Gillett, "Our Feminine Majority - The Positive Side," NSR, November 1977, 32-33;
105. Richard Tuttle, "CAT Goes to the Convention," NSR, October 1975, 47.
106. McFate, "Men Wanted."
107. Eugene A. Sattler, "The Reporting Systems Division," NSR, November 1974, 45; Bichy and Benoit (n. 30 above), 56-61; Wong (n. 39 above), 24.
108. Tuttle, "CAT Goes to the Convention," 47. Notice how several of Nelson's predictions demonstrated an understanding of the potential of real-time CAT, which had not yet been achieved commercially.
109. J. Michael Greenwood, Computer-Aided Transcription: A Survey of Federal Court-Reporters' Perceptions (Washington, D.C., 1981), 20.
110. Richard Delaplain, Computer-Aided Transcription in the Courts (Williamsburg, Va., 1981), 109-10.
111. For a limited institutional history of the closed-captioning system, see Mark G. Borchert, "The Development of Closed-Captioned Television: Technology, Policy, and Cultural Form" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998).
112. Press release from Joseph A. Califano, Jr. of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on the new closed-captioning project, 23 March 1979, Gallaudet University Archives, Donald V. Torr Papers (MSS 28), box I, folder 4; John E. D. Ball, "National Captioning Institute," in Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness, vol. 2, ed. John V. Van Cleve (New York, 1987), 222.
113. "Television for the Hearing Impaired," Volta Review 71 (1969): 401.
114. Jeff Hutchins and Carole Osterer, "Captioning Process at the Caption Center, WGBH," in Captioning: Shared Perspectives, Proceedings of the National Captioning Conference, June 1-3, 1978, ed. Barbara Braverman and Barry Jay Cronin (Rochester, N.Y., 1979), 37-45.
115. E. Ross Stuckless and T. Alan Hurwitz, "Reading Speech in Real-Time Print: Dream or Reality?" Deaf American, September 1982, 12.
116. Emily McCoy and Robert Shumway, "Real-Time Captioning: Promise for the Future," American Annals of the Deaf (hereafter AAD) 124 (1979): 683.
117. Malcolm Norwood, "Captioning for Deaf People: A Historical Overview," in Speech to Text, Today and Tomorrow: Proceedings of a Conference at Gallaudet University, September 1988, ed. Judith E. Harkins and Barbara M. Virvan (Washington, D.C., 1989), 137;
118. Martin H. Block and Marc Okrand, "Real-Time Closed-Captioned Television as an Educational Tool," AAD 128 (1983): 638;
119. Jeff Hutchins, "Real-Time Closed Captioning at NCI," Broadcast Engineering, May 1983, 26;
120. Jeff Hutchins, "Real-Time Captioning: The Current Technology," in Harkins and Virvan, 140.
121. Dena Kleiman, "First Deaf Lawyer Goes before Supreme Court," New York Times, 24 March 1982;
122. Joseph R. Karlovits, "Equal Justice - The Deaf and Court-Reporting," NSR, July 1982, 23-24.
123. Marshall Jorpeland, "Captain Marty Block Sets a Course for Reporting Excellence," NSR, November 1989, 79.
124. Norman Black, "Instant Captions for Deaf on Nightly News," Associated Press, 10 October 1982.
125. Elmer deWitt, "The Courtroom of the Future," Time, 4 August 1986, 60.
126. Judith H. Brentano, "Who or What Is 'Real-Time Ready'?" JCR, February 1992, 25.
127. Peter Wacht, "Captioning: Opportunities, Challenges, and the Future," JCR, July-August 2000, 52-59 (here, 58).
128. Gracia L. Roemer, "The Making of a 'Writer'," NSR, May 1989, 29.
129. Wacht, "Captioning," 58.
130. Patricia Brennan, "National Captioning Institute," Washington Post, 29 September 1985.
131. Linda D. Miller, "From the Courtroom to the Classroom" NSR, July 1985, 32;
132. Ann Kanter, "From Courtroom to Classroom," NTID Focus, summer 1986, 6-7.
133. The CART acronym was recently reinterpreted to mean "Communication Access Real-Time Translation" not only to bring the " accessibility" discourse of the 1990s into the occupational title, but also apparently to remove the emphasis on technology and focus on the service requiring "additional expertise in conveying the intent and spirit of the speaker's message"; see Nancy L. Catuogno, "An Introduction to CART," JCR, April 1999, 55-59.
134. Deanna Baker, "The Real-Time Market: Wide Open, and Not That Scary," JCR, August 1992, 36.
135. Jonathan Young, "Communicating with Real Time," JCR, April 1997, 34.
136. Typical equipment for a remote captioner included: "[T]hree computers; three steno machines; audio equipment, including a Gentner to capture an audio line for those shows she [the captioner] cannot see on television; a DSS satellite dish with sports and entertainment packages; three modems; and five telephone lines." Jennifer L. C. Pridmore, "The Good, the Bad, and the Late Breaking," JCR, September 2003, 66-67.
137. William Cutler, "Captioning as an Interpretive Medium," in Harkins and Virvan (n. 69 above), 151.
138. Baker, "The Real-Time Market," 37.
139. Jorpeland (n. 71 above), 78-80.
140. Cynthia Moore Callahan, "The Verbatim Principle: A Linguistic Analysis of Court-Reporter Practices" (master's thesis, North Carolina State University-Raleigh, 1995).
141. Kevin William Daniel and Mary Cox Daniel, Writing Naked: Principles of Writing for Real Time and Captioning (Vienna, Va., 1998), ii;
142. Nancy J. Hopp, "Real-time Fear and Loathing Myths Debunked," JCR, February 2000, 66.
143. Ric Williams and Jean Gonzalez, Advanced Court-Reporting Technology: Computer Concepts (Huntington Beach, Calif., 1991);
144. David Perry, "Digital Video + Transcript = New Market Opportunity," JCR, January 1998, 33-35.
145. Vicki Y. Johnson, "How to Save & Make Reporting Jobs," JCR, August 1994, 47.
146. Peter Wacht, "The Future Is Now: Computer-Integrated Courtrooms," JCR, March 1996, 29.
147. Paul Haynes, "The New Millennium Reporter," JCR, July 1997, 29.
148. J. Edward Varallo, "Reporters as Managers? I Think Not," JCR, December 1997, 39.
149. Marianne Lindley, "The Real World of Real Time," JCR, July 1992, 49.
150. Peter Wacht, "Five Hundred New Jobs: How You Can Prepare," JCR, May 1996, 40-41.
151. Thorn Weidlich, "Reporting and Technology: What Does the Future Hold?" JCR, March 1999, 58.
152. Wacht, "Captioning" (n. 75 above), 57.
153. See Greg Downey, "Jumping Contexts of Space and Time," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 26 (April-June 2004): 2-4.
154. Anthony N. Morphy, How to Be a Court Reporter (Bayonne, N.J., 1980), compiled from articles published in 1958.
155. Monette Benoit, "Wanted: Reporters for Cybercasting Careers," JCR, May 1998, 60-62;
156. "Members Reject Voice Writer Amendment," ICR, October 2001, 55-56.