THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LONGHAND PENMANSHIP AND SHORTHAND WRITING

The purpose of this study is to determine the predictive value of longhand penmanship for success in Gregg Shorthand writing. The longhand tests consisted of copying the first four sentences of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; the shorthand specimens were obtained from copying the entire Address. The rating scale selected for classifying longhand samples was the Ayres Handwriting Scale by Leonard P. Ayres, while the shorthand specimens were rated by Hoke’s Shorthand Penmanship Scale. Three longhand specimens were secured from each pupil, one at the first of the year, one at the beginning of the second semester, and one at the conclusion of the school year. The shorthand specimen was obtained at the end of the year, together with the causes for withdrawals from shorthand. These tests were administered to 676 Shorthand I students, who represented thirty high schools in the state of Kansas. The students were composed of 662 girls and 14 boys, 628 righthanded students and 48 lefthanded students. The correlations obtained between the speed and quality of longhand and shorthand writing are significant. Further consideration of longhand penmanship might prove its usefulness as a part of a battery of tests for predictive and selective purposes

An experimental study to determine the comparative validity and reliability of two methods for measuring shorthand achievement

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Stenography and Literature: What did Western European and Russian Writers Master the Art of Shorthand Writing For?

What brings together Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Vsevolod Krestovsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Аlexander Kuprin, George Bernard Shaw, and Аstrid Lindgren, i.e. writers from different countries and belonging to different epochs? In their creative work, they all used stenography, or rapid writing, permitting a person to listen to true speech and record it simultaneously. This paper discloses the role of stenography in literary activities of European and Russian writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some researchers believe that the first ties between shorthand and literature appeared in the days of Shakespeare when the playwright's competitors used shorthand to put down the texts of his plays. Others have convincingly refuted this viewpoint, proving that such records never existed. The most famous English novelist in the 17th and 18th centuries Daniel Defoe can be considered one of the first writers who used shorthand in his literary work. The writers mastering the art of shorthand writing such as Defoe, Dickens, and Lindgren were popular in various professional spheres (among others, the secret service, journalism, and secretarial service) where they successfully applied their skills in shorthand writing. Stenography was an integral part of a creative process of the authors who resorted to it (Dostoevsky, Krestovsky, Shaw, and Lindgren). It economized their time and efforts, saved them from poverty and from the terms of enslavement stipulated in the contracts between writers and publishers. It is mainly thanks to stenography that their works became renowned all over the world. If Charles Dickens called himself “the best writer-stenographer” of the 19th century, F. M. Dostoevsky became a great admirer of the “high art” of shorthand. He was the second writer in Russia (following V. Krestovsky), who applied shorthand writing in his literary work but the only one in the world literature for whom stenography became something more than just shorthand. This art modified and enriched the model of his creative process not for a while but for life, and it had an influence on the poetics of his novels and the story A Gentle Creature, and led to changes in the writer's private life. In the course of the years of the marriage of Dostoevsky and his stenographer Anna Snitkina, the author's artistic talent came to the peak. The largest and most important part of his literary writings was created in that period. As a matter of fact, having become the “photograph” of live speech two centuries ago, shorthand made a revolution in the world, and became art and science for people. However, its history did not turn to be everlasting. In the 21st century, the art of shorthand writing is on the edge of disappearing and in deep crisis. The author of the paper touches upon the problem of revival of social interest in stenography and its maintenance as an art. Archival collections in Europe and Russia contain numerous documents written in short-hand by means of various shorthand systems. If humanity does not study shorthand and loses the ability to read verbatim records, the content of these documents will be hidden for us forever

SymbolDesign: A User-centered Method to Design Pen-based Interfaces and Extend the Functionality of Pointer Input Devices

A method called "SymbolDesign" is proposed that can be used to design user-centered interfaces for pen-based input devices. It can also extend the functionality of pointer input devices such as the traditional computer mouse or the Camera Mouse, a camera-based computer interface. Users can create their own interfaces by choosing single-stroke movement patterns that are convenient to draw with the selected input device and by mapping them to a desired set of commands. A pattern could be the trace of a moving finger detected with the Camera Mouse or a symbol drawn with an optical pen. The core of the SymbolDesign system is a dynamically created classifier, in the current implementation an artificial neural network. The architecture of the neural network automatically adjusts according to the complexity of the classification task. In experiments, subjects used the SymbolDesign method to design and test the interfaces they created, for example, to browse the web. The experiments demonstrated good recognition accuracy and responsiveness of the user interfaces. The method provided an easily-designed and easily-used computer input mechanism for people without physical limitations, and, with some modifications, has the potential to become a computer access tool for people with severe paralysis.National Science Foundation (IIS-0093367, IIS-0308213, IIS-0329009, EIA-0202067

“A Shorthand of Stars”: From John to Thomas Pynchon

The June 1888 issue of the Phonographic World magazine presented John Pynchon, an ancestor of Thomas, as “The First American Shorthand Reporter”. While most biographical criticism to date of Thomas Pynchon has focused on the cameo appearance of a thinly veiled William Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, we here set out further historical information on John alongside an appraisal of shorthand in the novels of Thomas

GART: The Gesture and Activity Recognition Toolkit

Presented at the 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Beijing, China, July 2007.The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comThe Gesture and Activity Recognition Toolit (GART) is a user interface toolkit designed to enable the development of gesture-based applications. GART provides an abstraction to machine learning algorithms suitable for modeling and recognizing different types of gestures. The toolkit also provides support for the data collection and the training process. In this paper, we present GART and its machine learning abstractions. Furthermore, we detail the components of the toolkit and present two example gesture recognition applications

The development of a shorthand aptitude test, using recognized shorthand strokes in its construction

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.Statement of the Problem. This study was conducted in an effort to construct tests that will presumably measure a student's ability to master shorthand. Research Procedures and Techniques. The probable factors involved in learning a shorthand system were formulated, and subtests were constructed that might measure a student's ability to learn shorthand. The subtests involved (1) Phonetic Spelling, (2) Reading Shorthand, (3) Writing Phonetics, (4) Writing Shorthand, (5) Writing Speed, and (6) Spelling. In 1957-58 two student populations participated in the experiment-a junior college group of approximately 200 students and a high school group of approximately 480 students. The tests were administered during the first two days of classes, before the students had had instruction in shorthand. At the end of the first semester and at the end of the second semester of study, shorthand achievement tests were administered. These tests included exercises in dictation from studied and unstudied material at varying rates, transcription of this material into longhand, and word lists that test the knowledge of shorthand principles and size of vocabulary, Means, medians, standard deviations, and percentiles were computed for the student populations. An item analysis on the basis of right-wrong answers was completed. Single and multiple correlations were computed on the test data from four groups: (l) 110 high school students after one semester of study, (2) 94 junior college students after one semester of study, (3) 108 high school students after two semesters of study, and (4) 129 junior college students after two semesters of study. Summary of Findings. Using the scores of 110 high school students, the coefficients of correlation between the six subtests--Phonetic Spelling, Reading Shorthand, Writing Phonetics, Writing Shorthand, Writing Speed, Spelling--and the first-semester dictation-transcription test (l957-58) were: .341, .305, .010, .283, .248, .329, and with the total score, .407; for 94 junior college student scores, .317, -.039, .051, -.071, .116, .362, and with the total score, .177. The Multiple R between these high school aptitude test scores and the first-semester criterion was .5028, with a standard error of .0736; with the junior college scores, .453, with a standard error of .O852. Using the scores of 108 high school students, the coefficients of correlation between the six subtests and the second-semester dictation-transcription test (1957-58) were .388, .246, -.OOO8, .182, .222, .367, and with the total score, .339; for 129 junior college student scores, .213, .010, .169, -.019, .130, .350, and with the total score, .227. The Multiple R between these high school aptitude scores and the second semester criterion was .528, with a standard error of .0717; with the junior college scores, .404, with a standard error of .0757. Conclusions. Most of the individual subtests show slight to negligible relationship with the achievement criteria. The Multiple R's for the high school groups indicate a relationship of some value. The test battery seems to predict success more effectively, even though slight, among high school students than among junior college students. Further, among high school students the battery seems to predict success more effectively at the end of the first semester than at the end of the second semester of study. [TRUNCATED