Well, the past two days I've been sitting on a jury. The case (a DUI) was settled halfway through the witness' testimony for the plaintiff. The defendant pleaded to a lesser charge, and the jury was dismissed. I had a chance to speak with the court reporter and ask some questions about her job as I was waiting for my paperwork. The stenographic machines are now hooked up to laptops and some software (generically called CAT for computer-aided transcription) is used to do realtime transcriptions from the stenographic tapes. The machines themselves are ineresting, having 22 keys, and the letters associated with each key are printed to a fixed location on the tape. The notes are recorded phonemically with lots of special abbreviations and phrases stored in the CAT software's dictionary. Basically, each court reporter comes up with his or her personal system after working at it a while. Some phonemes are represented by chords of letters, e.g., the first two "letters" of my first name "Jim" comes out on the tape as SKWR and EU for "J" and "I." Another interesting bit of information is that court reporters are used for close captioning. Makes sense.
Posted by jim at June 12, 2003 12:19 PM