Book Review: Court Reporter Technology

An Introduction to
       Court Reporter Technology
339 pages; softcover
NCRA Press, 1997
800-272-NCRA
www.ncraonline.org
$24.95/members, $29.95/non-members

A book publisher that puts out a monthly magazine has quite a wealth of material to draw from, and An Introduction to Court Reporter Technology takes great advantage of it. The list of subject editors and contributing authors includes some of the great technological luminaries of our profession - people like Mike Brentano, Joe Karlovits, Merilyn Sanchez, and Richard Sherman. By way of full disclosure, we should also point out that it includes three members of your ReporterCentral team: Kevin Daniel, Bill Greenley, and me (Gary Robson). All in all, over a dozen subject editors and over 30 contributing authors provided material for this book.

The great advantage of such a diverse team is the eye-opening myriad of points of view. You can see the technologies through the eyes of the technologists, the pioneers, and the everyday users. The breadth of knowledge is greater than any single author could bring to bear.

The book represents a blend of original material written by the subject editors, and dozens of articles. The disadvantages to this approach are an inevitable lack of continuity and sometimes jarring chronological transitions between the older and newer articles of which this book is made up. The editorial team did their best to alleviate these problems by filling in text around the articles and by bringing some of them up-to-date with (usually minimal) editing.

The book is divided into a dozen chapters, generally arranged to take you from the straightforward, mainstream technologies off into the cutting edge for the profession. The chapters are:

1. Computer-Aided Transcription (CAT)
2. The Basics of Realtime
3. Realtime in the Legal Setting
4. Realtime as an Assistive Technology
5. Captioning
6. Convention Reporting
7. Legal Video
8. Courtroom Administrative Data Interchange (CADI)
9. Voice Recognition Technology
10. Online Technology
11. Videoconferencing
12. Imaging and Optical Character Recognition

Clearly, there is a lot of material to cover in under 350 pages. Since the majority of the material comes from Journal of Court Reporting articles, it was originally written for a space-limited environment. The editors generally did a good job of paring out redundancy and including enough material to go beyond just a superficial overview.

The book's greatest failing in my mind is its lack of an index. The very nature of the material leads much of the book to make rather dry reading, and I envision most of the readers using it as a reference book on specific subjects rather than reading it cover-to-cover. While the detailed six-page table of contents is certainly a great help in finding material, it is no substitute for a comprehensive index, where you can find that reference to TAC in the CADI chapter.

All in all, I'd say this book should have a place on the bookshelf of any reporter interested in the technologies the profession uses, and in the future of the court reporting profession.

"As technologies such as realtime as text-display software mature, and other more advanced technologies take shape, court reporting will continue to move forward. From the earliest of its beginnings, whether confronted with lethargy or skepticism, the profession has never failed to assimilate new methods and new technologies to remain a critical part of the judicial environment"

-- Pete Wacht, from the Introduction