Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup --
Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup

Back in CAT class again. Time for part two of Steno for Sci-Fi Geeks. So what can a stenographer do in the Future? A couple story ideas: Souped-up Amanuensis Nobody uses stenographers to take dictation anymore; most people can type, and those who prefer dictating can either use voice-recognition software (fairly accurate, even without extensive training, as long as the speed stays around 160, the dictator corrects his own work, and the errors don't need to be corrected in realtime) or get some low-paid schlub to qwerty it for them off a tape. But say you develop some kind of motormouth drug and give it to a writer. He froths at the mouth, his eyes bug out, and he starts babbling at 400 words a minute, all deathless brilliance; the kind of inspiration that only comes to the dangerously overclocked. You can't just record it and slow it down for transcription later, because he needs the transcript for editing as soon as he comes out of the trance, before the sweats take him and he's prostrate for a week. Raw, the stuff is gibberish, and he's the only one who can tame it. He can't grasp the structure of the thing unless he's in that liminal state between frenzy and sanity, and he can't do it unless he has the words in print in front of him. If the text is uncorrected before he sleeps, it's like somebody else's dream; flat and senseless. The stenographer is his collaborator. He downs an accelerator that tweaks the ears and fingers and keeps pace with every word. The stuff is so disconnected that only a sensitive mind-- a critic, even-- can get it down so it looks like language. The trance lets up, the writer draws breath, and he grabs the readout to wrestle it into art before his body gives out. The stenographer is his scopist and his witness. They set to the work together. Kinda like The Gambler for the Devil Dust set. Gargoyle In Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, a Gargoyle is a much-reviled geekboy who's obsessed with recording every moment of his life, in hopes of nabbing some overlooked intel to sell to moneyed sources. They're pathetic, but they've got sexy, sexy gear. So of course the guy wants an instant transcript of everything he hears; scanning through days of video to find one conversation is prohibitively tedious. Searchable text is the only way. No keyboard for him, though-- gloves. Gloves like every NES-brat of the '80s always wanted. The steno layout is much better suited for for it than qwerty is. On a regular keyboard, the left pointer finger is used for F, R, T, G, B, V, and C. How are you gonna map that in space without tactile feedback? On a steno keyboard, each finger (except the right pinky, which does double duty) can be up, down, or in the middle-- that's all. Easy as anything. He can even strip off his more conspicuous equipment and keep his twitchy fingers in his pockets if he doesn't want to be caught eavesdropping. This sort of dork would be best suited to near-Future cyberpunkish stories. I don't have a hook for him, but I think he's a picturesque figure. Deaf Cult Shabbas Goy Text junkies like myself are occasionally horrified to hear stories about Deaf people who decide that all non-sign communication is inferior to sign, and refuse to have any truck with spoken or written English. From my casual trolling around the Deaf web, this sort of perspective seems to be pretty rare-- even the sign-intensive videoblogs I found used text (in ASL, not English, syntax) as convenient-- but extremists make for good Amazing Stories, so let's have a group that shuns all non-spatial discourse. Maybe they're natively Deaf, maybe they're self-deafened, maybe some of them even hear, but they hate oral speech and its lesser imp, text, and only trust what's said with fingers. But now and then they have to interact with the Hearing world, and that's when they call on their envoy, a kid who, though forbidden speech, has been trained to turn sign into text. It has to be high-speed-- they can't be thought slow or halting-- so he's got to be steno-trained; pencil and paper won't do. It's an honorable job, but an alienating one. They need him, but they can't quite trust him. Alternately, he could be a Hearing kid, selected from the outside to be trained in sign. That's the Shabbas Goy angle. Or flipping the whole idea, the cult could be composed of hacker-types who refuse to communicate in anything but text. Speech in that case wouldn't be inferior in kind; just in utility. But to some people, efficiency is everything. Away Team Most of us have spent some time in chat rooms, and the sort of conversational dynamic that can develop in them is worth noting. You can't have ten different people all participating in a verbal conversation at once; they have to take turns. That probably makes for better discourse, frankly. In chat rooms, you'll see volleys of text layering over each other every second, some responding to what came before, and some just blurting out solipsisms unconnected to the thread of the dialogue. It's not unintelligible, because you don't need to be able to follow each word as it's said; you can review it at will and extract what you need from the record. So you've got a team of explorers relaying back information to Command. 20 continuous audio streams would be impossible to coordinate. 20 stenographers, all transmitting data as quick as thought, could be easily be wrangled by a single officer, who'd get a composite idea of the landscape more precise than even video could make it. Field Linguist One thing about steno everyone knows: it's phonetic. So a linguist is trying to learn an alien language to codify for Science or whatever. He walks through the city, listening uncomprehendingly, but able to discern word-like patterns instinctively, the way no computer can. As each phoneme strikes his ear, he punches it into his machine, which collates a database of possible-words and helps him piece together what it could all possibly mean. Basically just one more excuse to bring out the awesome Steno-Gloves (damn, I can't wait for those things to get invented), but I'll take what I can get. Mute Alien A variation of the Deaf Cult-- a creature with fingers but no vocal chords, who wants to speak like a native. Text-to-speech (unlike speech-to-text) is a doddle, and steno's the only thing that's quick enough. To make this one interesting, you can put in some of those ever-hilarious word boundary errors of the "Schubert's Sarah Neighed" variety. Hinge Point Relay Say there's a strange point of space where radio waves from dizzyingly far away-- and impossible to detect even a parsec in any direction-- can be heard and transmitted. There's some sort of localized jump through which speech can pass but nothing else, and no one knows who's on the other end of the line. It's a delicate situation, diplomatically and scientifically, but the pod squatting in the area can only hold two crewmen and their necessaries; any bigger structures seem to interfere with the signal. They sit there for half a year, alternating shifts, tuning in to whatever's out there, and transcribing it all. They've tried sending the audio home directly, but it always winds up scrambled. For now, only the text channel will get through. They take it down faithfully and send it on, the two of them alone in the empty sunlight. And sometimes they get orders to say something back. Two-Brain Translator Cut a dude's medulla oblongata. The two sides of his brain are no longer working together. Teach him steno while stimulating one side. Teach him a foreign language while stimulating the other. Now he can take down whatever he hears without paying any conscious attention to it, and then, reading (all jamais vu) the readout he finds his fingers making, he can translate it on the spot without having to pause and listen and pause and think and pause and speak the translation. Instant all-in-one interpreter. Far-fetched, I think, but I kinda like the conceit. Royal Scribe This is my favorite one. The thing with stories is you have to make them high-stakes. Now, I find the act of dictionary building totally fascinating, just because there are too many words in the language to be able to cover every possibility. You have to hoard every word that you hear or read, put it into your own personal brand of steno, and then wedge it into the dictionary so that it doesn't conflict with any word or combination of words that's already in there. But there's no way to work that into a story, 'cause if you taking dictation and an unentered word comes up-- you get an untranslate, is all. Egg on your face, but not the stuff of drama. But say you had an imperial court in which every word spoken is not just recorded, but projected, shimmering, into the air by each nobleman's personal scribe. Air Poetry is their means of art and intrigue, and every misstroke or untranslate is an ignominious loss of face, not just for the nobleman, but for his poor button-pusher, who not only has to keep a lexicon of words, but must allow for coinages and puns and attractive flutterings and colors and typefaces to match the mood of his master-- or he's in deadly disgrace, and a new scribe takes over. I wish I could read these, but first they'd have to be written, and I've got neither the time nor the skillz. But I hope I've convinced you that there's a place for my profession on Mars. Maybe I'll even live to see it. Any of y'all got any more? _ respond?