Stenography in Academia

There is limited academic research about stenography. In fact, many queries regarding stenography will actually turn up results about steganography, which is of interest to computer security experts, and, although many of these results were simply entered incorrectly into paper databases, some of these search results are papers that have misspelled the word steganography in the actual body (or even title) of the paper.

Some research into stenography deals with written shorthand. This is out of scope for this wiki, which is focused on stenotype keyboards and computer stenography.

This page is intended to be a collection of references to academic works involving computer stenography.

Stenography alternatives
==== A chord stenograph keyboard: a possible solution to the learning problem in stenography ==== This article proposes a new stenography system called MCS, built to compete with the Stenograph and Palantype. The paper suggests that the Stenograph is too hard to learn: it takes too long to learn, disambiguation is hard, and word boundries are confusing to get right. In the new system, each stroke encodes just a pair of phonemes rather than a three-phoneme syllable, which the authors suggest is able to remove ambiguity without sacrificing much speed. The claim is that stenography rate can exceed QWERTY rates after about fifty hours of instruction.

This paper does not really attempt to contend with stenography's high speeds; instead, it suggestion a technique that beats stenography's time-to-beat-qwerty.

==== Arpège: Learning multitouch chord gestures vocabularies ==== This paper discusses chord creation mechanisms for designers of chorded input systems, especially on touch screens. Although it doesn't make a specific attempt to propose an alternative to stenography, this paper may be a good starting point for people trying to develop successor systems to stenotype, since it includes a lot of information on which chords are most easily learned and executed.

Passive Haptic Learning
Passive haptic learning is a mechanism that teaches motor skills, like input methods, using haptic actuators on learners' bodies (most commonly, their hands and fingers). This learning can be done passively, i.e. while the learner is distracted by some other task.

This technique has been applied to teaching stenotype, with some success:


 * Passive Haptic Learning for Computer Stenography
 * A preliminary apparatus and teaching structure for passive tactile training of stenography

If you need help accessing PHL papers behind paywalls, you can contact the author of these papers, User:TimothyAveni, who is also a member of the open steno community.