March 11, 2005
4-5:00, Informatics 107

From court reporting to closed-captioning to the classroom: Jumping contexts of labor with computer-aided stenography

Greg Downey

Abstract:
In the early 1960s, the Department of Defense contracted with IBM on an ambitious project to create a hardware/software/human system of instantaneous language translation from Russian to English, involving fast mainframe computers, huge phoneme databases, and antiquated stenographic keyboards. Although the language translation project evolved in another direction, some of the key actors involved decided to migrate the system into an industry not previously known for its willingness to embrace electronic technology: stenographic court reporting.

While the practice of business technology systems spinning off from government-sponsored research efforts is not new in the history of computing, the case of "Computer Aided Transcription" or CAT does not end with this public-to-private transition. About a decade after mainframe-based CAT entered the world of the courtroom in the early 1970s, a PC-based version of CAT entered an entirely different context in the early 1980s: the television production studio. Here, the same technology for computer-aided human conversion of speech-to-text found a new application: realtime closed-captioning. Finally, a laptop-based version of CAT made yet another leap across context about a decade later, in the early 1990s, as an "assistive technology" for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in the classroom.

In all of these cases, the transition from one context to another has involved a key shift in the spatial and temporal parameters of the technology itself: the hardware shrank from mainframe to PC to laptop, while the software sped up to eventually allow both realtime translation and realtime formatting. Similarly, each shift in context was motivated by key regulatory changes, from demands for cheaper and faster transcripts in the state courtroom to the federal funding of closed-captioning and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But I argue that the most crucial ambassador across context for this technology has been human labor itself, as with each contextual change, CAT operators have been obliged to increase not only their speed and skill on the keyboard, not only their mental and magnetic domain dictionaries of translatable words, but also their broad understanding of, and empathy for, the populations they serve.

Biography:
Greg Downey is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a 50 percent appointment in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and a 50 percent appointment in the School of Library & Information Studies. He joined the UW faculty in 2001. Downey holds a B.S. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, an M.A. in liberal studies from Northwestern University, and a joint Ph.D. in history of technology and human geography from the Johns Hopkins University. Before coming to Madison, Downey spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography and the Humanities Institute at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Downey's research focuses on information and communication technology and the human labor behind it. His dissertation followed the story of a particular category of information workers, telegraph messenger boys, through a century of changes in the U.S. telegraph network from 1850 to 1950. A book based on this research, Telegraph Messenger Boys, was published by Routledge in 2002.

At Madison Downey has taught classes on Digital Divides and Cyberspace, as well as heading up J201: Introduction to Mass Communication. He has co-edited a book on "Uncovering labor in information revolutions," published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, and is presently studying the history and geography of the labor behind the closed captioning system, to be published as a book by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006.