Critical Issues
| Art vs. Skill | ||||
| Verbatim vs. Translation | ||||
| Stenography vs. Steganography | ||||
Art vs. Skill
For nearly two millenia, stenography was considered an art, and, for a time, magic. But in the late nineteenth century, it began to be referred to as a clerical skill, and in the late 20th century, innovations in speech recognition software began moving toward automating the function entirely. What precipitated its devaluation? One possible answer points to the invention of the typewriter in the 1880s and the causally related infusion of women into business offices immediately thereafter.
Verbatim vs. Translation
Stenography wasn't always designed for obtaining a verbatim transcript of an oral proceeding. In Ancient Rome, teams of scribes would take down orations in the Senate and afterwards compare notes to assemble a transcript. Today, court reporters are granted a license upon demonstrating competence in dictation at 96.5% accuracy, this rate being deemed as verbatim transcription. With a statutory allowance for this margin for error and given normal human frailty, is "verbatim" as a standard valid or is it more correct to call these "translations" of oral proceedings? For an institution such as the justice system, what is at stake in placing the verbatim transcript at the core, or structural center, of its foundation?
Stenography vs. Steganography
Stenographers serve as gatekeepers to a society's history as they silently record events and transcribe them into reliable records for posterity. From its inception through today, however, the rendering of speech into dashes and squiggles or some other stenographic system fosters anxiety due to the irretrievability of the dictated passage without the key to the code. For instance, classical scholars are still attempting to transcribe ancient manuscripts of shorthand writers. The poet Ausonius in the fourth century, in a eulogy for his stenographer, uses metaphors of theft and betrayal in his perception that a stenographer must have advance knowledge of what will be said and thus able to "fix my ideas on your tablets long before they are worded." Every stenographer learns a basic theory of shorthand but with actual use personalizes it to the extent that even a stenographer schooled in the same theory has difficulty deciphering another's notes. What, then, can be made of the uneasy reliance that the makers of history must have on the recorders of it?
Steganography: (Greek) steganos meaning hidden; graphein meaning to write (Simon Singh, The Code Book: the Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Quantum Cryptography, 1999).
