Pitman Shorthand Research Articles

Attitude of Office and Information Management (OIM) Students Towards The Learning of Pitman Shorthand

The study investigated the attitude of Office and Information Management students towards the learning of shorthand. The research design for the study was descriptive research of the survey type. The case-study research design was used. The population for the study was 45, consisting of all Office and Information Management (OIM) students in Bamidele Olumilua University of Education, Science and Technology, Ikere-Ekiti from 100 – 300 levels during the second semester of 2022/2023 academic session. The total population of 44 was used as the sample but only 36 copies of administered questionnaire were returned which formed the sample for the study. The questionnaire was tested for validity and reliability with a coefficient of 0.76, using crombach alpha. Data collected were analyzed with frequency count, mean and standard deviation for research questions and hypotheses were tested using PPMC at 0.05 level of significance. The results showed no significant relationship between students’ attitude and the factors responsible for students’ attitude to learning shorthand, and no significant relationship between students’ attitude to shorthand learning and lecturers’ disposition towards shorthand learning. It was concluded that factors responsible for OIM students’ poor performance or negative attitude to shorthand reside in them and only the teacher with determination to succeed can help them. It is recommended, among others, that Shorthand lecturers should help students by encouraging them, emphasizing the benefits of learning shorthand such as improved communication skill, ability to use it to keep secrets, fast note taking, accuracy in writing, employability, being an accurate worker and being a good memory aid for their bosses, among others. Keywords- Asynchronous, Academic Performance, Retention, Learning, Chemistry, Students. Aims Research Journal Reference Format: Fasae, F.B.K. (2023): Attitude of Office and Information Management (OIM) Students Towards The Learning of Pitman Shorthand. Advances in Multidisciplinary and Scientific Research Journal Vol. 9. No. 4. Pp 69-82. www.isteams.net/aimsjournal. dx.doi.org/10.22624/AIMS/V9N4P7

Dickens and the Stenographic Mind by Hugo Bowles

 Reviews sets up the timely and urgent ethical demand of open receptivity to the suffering of all creatures—human and non-human. N U E M Dickens and the Stenographic Mind. By H B. New York: Oxford University Press. . xvii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Dickens and the Stenographic Mind brings a linguistic perspective to the problem of sound and symbol in the work of Charles Dickens. Dickens’s ability to capture the sounds of speech has long been traced to his training in stenography, as phonographic training in recording language. Against this emphasis on sound, Hugo Bowles foregrounds spelling—or, more precisely, the relationship between the way a word sounds and how it is represented in writing. Bowles begins by pointing out that Dickens was biscriptal, ‘able to read and write in two graphic codes’ (p. ). Dickens learnt an alphabetical system of stenography that demanded that he be able to encrypt a word spoken aloud into a condensed representation of its written form, and then to decode his own notes back into English (thus, to write and read a second graphic code). Bowles argues persuasively that mastering this system helped Dickens develop unusual ways of processing language, a stenographic mind adept at ‘higher-order abilities of visualization and vocalization, which interacted with lower-order abilities such as the manipulation of letters and sounds to hypothesize possible words’ (p. ). ese skills are evident in the way Dickens ‘sets puzzles’ for readers, forcing them to decode new combinations of letters into familiar sounds (p. ). Dickens learnt stenography but also taught it, and developed a slightly idiosyncratic style that he continued to use later in life. e first three chapters of this book explain how Gurney shorthand (an alphabetic system), at the time Dickens learnt it, worked in comparison with its major competitor, Pitman shorthand (a phonographic system). What emerges is a vivid backdrop for Dickens’s play with sound and writing in his reporting, letters, and novels. ese mesmerizing chapters move between scholarly explication of the writing manuals and David Copper- field’s encounter with one, and between general rules of language use and specific examples of Dickens teaching shorthand. e focus of Dickens and the Stenographic Mind pivots at Chapter  from ‘what [Dickens] learned and how he learned it’ to show how, in the process of learning, ‘Dickens acquired the mindset of a puzzle solver by learning to encode and decode an unusually difficult shorthand system’ (p. ). is chapter begins a more speculative part of the book about the relation between cognition and creation. Here, the claims vary in scope, from specific claims supported by carefully chosen examples to broader conjectures made in passing. Chapter  gives historical context for Dickens’s court and parliamentary reporting to argue that he gained a more textured sense of different levels of reported speech. Entitled ‘PKWK’, Chapter  describes the variety of ways in which Dickens reshaped words in that novel, and connects those with habits of mind the Gurney system also demanded. MLR, .,   In Chapter , two things some of us thought we already understood—that Dickens’s work oen concerns the pedagogy of reading and writing, and that it oen calls attention to language as a baffling or misleading code—take on a new shape as Bowles pulls together some of the puzzles created by Dickens that are oen discussed in separate contexts, such as ‘Altro’ and Jenny’s riddle for Bradley Headstone in Little Dorrit, the letter from the lawyers to Esther Summerson, and Charley learning to read in Bleak House; Boffin’s semi-literacy in Our Mutual Friend, Jingle’s fractured speech, and  ,   from Pickwick; even Pip’s letter to Jo in Great Expectations. Sprinkled in among them are examples from Dickens’s correspondence, the Uncommercial Traveller, and e Haunted Man. For those who study texts with only a passive awareness that written language is an arbitrary method for encoding sound, this book is of special value as a careful study of the rules that govern another specific, shared code. Bowles ultimately develops in the reader what he calls us to recognize in Dickens: ‘a more sophisticated and transparent state of literacy and an...

Clerking for “God’s Grandfather”: Chauncey Belknap’s Year with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

Clerking for “God’s Grandfather”: Chauncey Belknap’s Year with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr TODD C. PEPPERS IRA BRAD MATETSKY ELIZABETH R. WILLIAMS JESSICA WINN Introduction In the last twenty years, historians have discovered the Supreme Court law clerk. Although the first clerks were hired by the Justices in the 1880s, for much of their existence the clerks toiled in relative anonym­ ity. Law clerks emerged from the shadows, however, when Court scholars began to appreciate the value of studying them, not only because clerks were eye-witnesses to the internal workings of the Supreme Court, but also because the clerks had substantive job duties and arguably wielded influence over the decision-making process. Most of what we know about law clerks comes from the clerks themselves, usually in the form oflaw review articles memorializing their Justices and their clerkships or in interviews with reporters and legal scholars. In a few instances, however, law clerks have contemporaneously memorialized their ex­ periences in diaries. These materials provide a rare window into the insular world of the Court. While the recollections contained in the diaries are often infused with youthful hero worship for their employer—in contra­ distinction to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s claim that no man is a hero to his valet— they offer a real-time, unfiltered peek at the personalities who populated the bench and the issues with which the Court was grap­ pling. Just such a snapshot in time is provided by the diary of Chauncey Belknap, a remarkable Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for Justice Holmes during October Term 1915. Through Belknap’s near-daily records of his clerkship, as well as his encounters with the glittering social set of pre-war Washington, we are permitted a 258 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY singular and fascinating glimpse into the colorful experience of working for one of the Court’s most famous jurists. A copy of the diary was obtained from Belknap’s long-time law firm, Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler. While portions of the diary have appeared in other books and articles, the diary has neverbeen reproduced in its entirety.1 This is due, in part, to the fact that the diary is written in a combination ofcursive that varies in its readability and Pitman shorthand. Over a two-year period, two of the co-authors (Williams and Winn) carefully transcribed the diary. Once the transcription was complete, a Pitman shorthand expert was retained to translate the shorthand into English. Finally, all four authors had to agree upon words that were challenging to discern because of Belknap’s handwriting. If agree­ ment could not be reached, then the word was listed as “unintelligible” in the final text. As they transcribed the text, Williams and Winn researched and annotated Belknap’s references to people, places, and events. The text was subsequently edited to make format­ ting and style more consistent. For purposes of publication, an abridged version ofthe diary is presented here. The selected entries and portions of entries reflect the tone of the diary as a whole and highlight the significant events and conversations Belknap recorded. Brief identifications of persons mentioned and explanations of unfamiliar terms, as well as citations, are provided in the endnotes. Before one turns to the diary, some background on its author is necessary. Belknap was bom on January 26, 1891, in Roselle Park, New Jersey, to Chauncey and Emma McClave Belknap. The early years of his life were filled with hardship and loss. His father was a sales executive with the Thomson Houston Electric Company. When Belknap was two years old, his father died of yellow fever during a business trip to South America. Belknap’s mother died two years later of appendicitis. Thus, Belknap was effectively orphaned by the age of four. Relatives raised Belknap and his young sister, Fredericka.2 The young children went to live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with maternal aunt Mary McClave, who was a school teacher. Living quarters were tight, and Belknap slept on the living-room couch. Many weekends were spent farther down­ town with his paternal aunts, Cornelia and Elizabeth Belknap, or with his uncle, Fred­ erick H...

Steam Writing in the Urli Daiz: William Orr, the Canadian Phonetic Pioneer, and the Cause of Phonographic Reform (pp 57-92)

In the early 1850s, a young and reform-minded phonographer named William Orr , based in Oshawa C.W., devised an ambitious plan to promote phonography and reformed spelling throughout Canada West and the British North American colonies. A promoter of Pitman shorthand, the editor and publisher of the journal the Canadian Phonetic Pioneer (1859-1861), and in all probability the country's first phonotypographer, Orr was considered in his own day to be a "fonetic pioneer" and even today can be considered an innovator in the fields of media and communications. This essay reconstructs the life and work of William Orr and the publishing history of the Canadian Phonetic Pioner, traces his involvement in the politics of the international phonographic community, and looks at related mid-century efforts to promote the "art phonographic" (through platform demonstrations, new associations, and Mechanics' Institute classes). "Spelling reform" is placed here, as it was for its practitioners, in the context of other mid-century social reform movements.

A Neural Network based Method for Recognition of Handwritten English Pitman's Shorthand

Pitman Shorthand method of documenting is normally practiced by stenographers to take dictation at speaking speed invented by Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837. Special graphical symbols are used in this method of representing phonetic compositions of the dictated text for certain interval. This shorthand representation itself is a compressed and encrypted format of the English text. The Pitman Shorthand Language (PSL) has the practical advantage of high speed of recording, more than 120–200 words per minute, because of which it is universally acknowledged. This recording medium has its continued existence in spite of considerable developments in speech processing systems, which are not universally established yet. In this method of documenting, speech is directly converted into phonetic strokes, where each phonetic stroke is a composition of consonants and vowels. These consonants are called consonant primitives or simply primitives. In order to exploit the vast transcribing potential of PSL a new area of research on automation of PSL processing is conceived. In this work, the Neural Network Classifier for recognition of PSL at word level is presented. All the activities such as preprocessing of data (image cropping, resizing and implementations) have been carried out using MATLAB. As per this experiment, 94% recognition accuracy is achieved. General Terms Pattern Recognition, Neural Network, Feature Extraction, Classification.

Shaw in “Sallust's House”

Shaw in “Sallust's House”

Segmentation and recognition of phonetic features in handwritten Pitman shorthand

There is a wish to be able to enter text into mobile computing devices at the speed of speech. Only handwritten shorthand schemes can achieve this data recording rate. A new, overall solution to the segmentation and recognition of phonetic features in Pitman shorthand is proposed in this paper. Approaches to the recognition of consonant outlines, vowel and diphthong symbols and shortforms, which are different components of Pitman shorthand, are presented. A new rule is introduced to solve the issue of smooth junctions in the consonant outlines which was normally the bottleneck for recognition. Experiments with a set of 1127 consonant outlines, 2039 vowels and diphthongs and 841 shortforms from three shorthand writers have demonstrated that the proposed solution is quite promising. The recognition accuracies for consonant outlines, vowels and diphthongs, and shortforms achieved 75.33%, 96.86% and 91.86%, respectively. From the evaluation of 461 outlines with smooth junction, the introduction of the new rule has a great positive effect on the performance of the solution. The recognition accuracy of smooth junction improves from 37.53% to 93.41% given a writing time increase of 14.42%.

The Encrypted Sermons of Sabato Morais

In the course of researching the attitudes of nineteenth-century rabbis about American slavery, David Cobin found that the name Sabato Morais featured prominently among rabbis who had publicly expressed strong anti-slavery sentiments. This information sent Cobin to the American Jewish History Library where some of Morais's papers are archived to find original documents on the matter. There he found sermons from 1861 to 1862 with English script title pages and text all written in Pitman Shorthand, presumably by Morais himself. One of these, an undated document entitled The Slavery of the Bible, described as a lecture, seemed to be exactly on point. Cobin's first hurdle, however, was transcribing Morais's lecture. After a significant search he found Dorothy Roberts, who had become an expert on Civil War Pitman Shorthand specifically in order to engage in this kind of scholarly transcription. It was soon clear, however, that transcribing a more than one hundred and forty year-old shorthand written for oneself was not a simple matter. There were obsolete words, partial words, undecipherable words, words left out, references to obscure incidents, incomplete quotations, and words in multiple languages. Cobin enlisted the collaboration of his colleague Earl Schwartz as co-editor, and together they partnered in the transcription process with Dorothy Roberts. Roberts transcribed the shorthand as best she could. Cobin and Schwartz then researched the history, filled in the Judaic references and mined old dictionaries and their own imaginations for language of the times to fit the words Roberts could not fully transcribe. Roberts always made the final decision on the appropriateness of the editors' suggestions in light of the shorthand. This work yielded the transcribed lecture, The Slavery in the Bible that indeed spoke about slavery in the time of the Bible, but not about American slavery. Morais's focus was on a humane form of slavery in contrast to slavery in Sparta and Rome. Unlike Rabbi Morris Raphall's discourse on The Bible View of Slavery January 15, 1861 that was used by Southerners as a defense of slavery, Morais's lecture provided little material to fuel the conflagration then raging. The editors have concluded that Morais's lecture was likely delivered as a response to Raphall's widely publicized discourse. The Slavery of the Bible is included with the four transcribed Sabbath sermons published here.

Hidden Markov model-based approach for generation of Pitman shorthand language symbols for consonants and vowels from spoken english

Pitman shorthand language (PSL) is a widely practised medium for transcribing/recording speech to text (StT) in English. This recording medium continues to exist in spite of considerable development in speech processing systems (SPS), because of its ability to record spoken/dictated text at high speeds of more than 120 words per minute. Hence, scope exists for exploiting this potential of PSL in present SPS.In this paper, an approach for feature extraction using Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and classification using hidden Markov models (HMM) for generating strokes comprising consonants and vowels (CV) in the process of production of Pitman shorthand language from spoken English is proposed. The proposed method is tested on a large number of samples, drawn from different speakers and the results are encouraging. The work is useful in total automation of PSL processing.

Recognition of Pitman shorthand text using tangent feature values at word level

Recognition of text recorded in Pitman shorthand language (PSL) is an interesting research problem. Automatic reading of PSL and generating equivalent English text is very challenging. The most important task involved here is the accurate recognition of Pitman stroke patterns, which constitute “text” in PSL.The paper describes automatic recognition of the strokes of the PSL at word level. A pen-down to pen-up sequence makes a stroke, which is a composition of primitives. The words are separated based on pen-down and pen-up points. The features that form a word (a stroke) are grouped first. Next, primitives and their sequence are identified and passed to a recognizer which identifies the word. A tangent-based vector through the contour of a stroke identifies the consonant primitives. Any other marks close to the stroke but not associated with the contour of a stroke represent the vowel markers.

A knowledge-based approach for recognition of handwritten Pitman shorthand language strokes

The Pitman shorthand language (PSL) is a recording medium practised in all organizations, where English is the transaction medium. It has the practical advantage of high speed of recording, more than 120–200 words per minute, because of which it is universally acknowledged. This recording medium has its continued existence in spite of considerable developments in speech processing systems, which are not universally established yet. In order to exploit the vast transcribing potential of PSL a new area of research on automation of PSL processing is conceived. It has three major steps, namely, shape recognition of PSL strokes, their validation and English text production from these strokes. The paper describes a knowledge-based approach for the recognition of PSL strokes. Information about location and the direction of the starting point and final point of strokes are considered the knowledge base for recognition of strokes. The work comprises preprocessing, determination of starting and final points, acquisition of quadrant knowledge, graph-based traversal and finally a rule-based inference process for generating phonetic equivalent of English language characters for the strokes. The proposed work is thoroughly tested for a large number of handwritten strokes.

Di- and trigraphia among the A-Hmao in Yunnan Province, China

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the di- and trigraphia that has evolved among the A-Hmao in northeastern and central Yunnan since the late 1950s and particularly after the reform movements initiated in the 1980s. The A-Hmao language, of the Miao language group, spoken by approximately 300,000 people, remained unwritten until the beginning of the twentieth century. The British missionary Samuel Pollard devised a script based on Cree, Pitman's shorthand, and Latin letters. It gained enormous success during the ensuing decades. In 1958 the Chinese authorities endorsed a Hanyu Pinyin±based writing system, but it was propagated only after 1980. In theory this 1958 orthography is used on a trial basis until the People's Congress can sanction it. Nonetheless, authorities dealing with the use of A-Hmao writing in Yunnan have launched a reformed Pollard script incorporating the linguistic analysis underlying the 1958 script.

The shorthand publications of Sir William Richard Gowers.

To examine the shorthand publications of Sir William Richard Gowers. Gowers developed an almost obsessional interest in Pitman shorthand. During the later part of his active career (1894-1910), the bulk of his professional writing, comprising nearly 100 articles, was printed entirely in Pitman shorthand in the Phonographic Record of Clinical Teaching and Medical Science. The obscurity and rarity of this periodical, and the increasingly arcane nature of Pitman shorthand, has left the bulk of these articles "buried in obscurity and locked up in code" (M. Critchley, 1949). A complete set of Gowers' shorthand publications as listed in his standard bibliography was compiled. Transcription of the Pitman shorthand outlines was performed by a qualified Pitman shorthand transcriber and verified using the contemporaneous Phonographic Outlines of Medical Terms (1902) as an authoritative guide. The first transcription of Gowers' shorthand publications has now been completed. The history of Gowers' interest in shorthand and his efforts to proselytize the medical profession is reviewed. Selected excerpts are presented from his shorthand articles, which include papers devoted to problems in practical diagnosis, notes on clinical teaching, and the shorthand transcriptions of his lectures at Queen Square and at University College Hospital on such diverse subjects as myelitis, neurosyphilis, polio, muscular dystrophy, tumors, vascular disease, epilepsy, and the nervous system in old age. The previously unpublished transcriptions of his shorthand articles represent a major and previously inaccessible part of Gowers' neurologic opus. These articles exemplify Gowers as a practicing neurologist and teacher, and significantly expand our insights into one of neurology's most significant and influential figures.

Segmentation and recognition of handwritten pitman shorthand outlines using an interactive heuristic search

A new approach to the overall segmentation and interpretation of the consonant part of shorthand outlines is proposed in this paper. In the approach an interactive heuristic search scheme allows communication between bottom-up and top-down recognition processes. The communication, in turn, leads the direction of search towards the best or nearly the best interpretation of the consonant outline. Experiments using a set of 2058 shorthand outlines from five writers show that, in comparison with a non-interactive technique, the approach is efficient and produces an improvement from 65 to 85% in correct outline segmentation and an improvement from 48 to 57% in correct recognition of complicated consonant outlines.

Evaluation of dynamic programming algorithms for the recognition of shortforms in Pitman's shorthand

Abstract This paper describes template matching using dynamic programming to recognise unconstrained Pitman's handwritten shortforms. Four basic dynamic programming recognition algorithms and their variations were studied and their performance compared in terms of recognition performance and computational cost.

Cherokee Shorthand: As Derived from Pitman Shorthand and in Relation to the Dot-Notation Variant of the Sac and Fox Syllabary

Cherokee Shorthand: As Derived from Pitman Shorthand and in Relation to the Dot-Notation Variant of the Sac and Fox Syllabary

Automatic recognition and transcription of Pitman's handwritten shorthand—An approach to shortforms

A verbatim written transcript of speech would have many applications in the office, in verbatim reporting and as an aid for the deaf. Unfortunately, the automatic recognition of unlimited vocabulary speech is not likely to be possible for a number of years. An alternative strategy, investigated at Southampton University, is to attempt the less complex task of automatically transcribing handwritten notes made using the Pitman shorthand notation. Pitman shorthand outlines can be split into two classes of characters, shortforms (comprising over 90 of the most frequently used words and phrases in the English language) and vocalised outlines which can represent any word pseudo-phonetically. The shortforms represent as much as 50% of normal shorthand and are recognised directly using a dynamic programming technique with typical recognition accuracy of over 90%. Vocalised outlines are recognised using a syntactic method which interacts with a knowledge source derived from analysis of a large number of shorthand outlines. This paper describes the recognition strategy for Pitman shorthand shortforms which uses the dynamic programming template matching technique.

On-line recognition of Pitman's handwritten shorthand—an evaluation of potential

This paper describes a number of evaluation experiments designed to establish the potential of Pitman's handwritten shorthand as an input for computer transcription to text. Such a system would have applications in verbatim reporting, the electronic office, and as an aid for the deaf. The experiments described compare the performance of a proposed computer transcription system for shorthand (described previously in this journal) with the benchmark performance obtained using human transcription. In addition, measurements on typical Pitman shorthand data are used to estimate potential performance limits. It is concluded that the poor overall performance of the proposed computer transcription system is due to a combination of three factors: first, the simplified nature of the recognition algorithms used compared with the knowledge-based techniques used by human shorthand readers; secondly, ergonomie deficiencies of the data input devices used; and finally, writer's lack of familiarity with the system and its capabilities. A proposed strategy for improving the performance of the system by attention to the first two of these deficiencies is given.

The Application of Gregg Methods to the Teaching of Pitman Shorthand

The Application of Gregg Methods to the Teaching of Pitman Shorthand

Experiment in the teaching of Pitman's Shorthand

Experiment in the teaching of Pitman's Shorthand