Below is a five minute unscripted story of my family first processing the COVID -19 pandemic as captured by speech-to-text technology in the notes application of my iPhone. I’ve gone ahead and annotated one of the texts in order to classify the ways in which the text deviates from written conventions of English (scroll to the end to compare to the second text). I’ve sorted the differences into two categories: 1) Errors of the speech-to-text technology (represented in green) and 2) differences in spontaneous speech to written text (represented in purple). As an additional exercise I attempted to retell the same story, but using the speech-to-text technology on my Microsoft Surface. Telling the story twice was interesting for two reasons: 1) It was interesting to see if one speech-to-text application was more accurate than the other, and 2) It was interesting to see the way my story changed;  the details I did or didn’t include on the second retelling, even though I told the story back to back.

Unscripted oral story captured by iPhone speech-to-text technology

Both of the text-to-speech technologies differed similarly from the writing conventions of written English. The technologies didn’t make the same exact errors, but made the same types of errors. Overall, the text reads like a stream of consciousness and I think this is both due to how spontaneous speech occurs and to errors in speech-to-text technology, for that reason I did not ascribe lack of punctuation or lack of written structure specifically to either category. It is difficult to determine what the most common errors are as I don’t have an exact copy of my spontaneous story and therefore do not know precisely the nature of all the errors. Because there is a 24 hour lag from when I used the technology to when I began to review the technology,  I can not recall what may be missing from my story or what the speech-to-text technology has added. The most salient errors appear to be recognition errors. Interestingly, as Gnanadesikan (2009) notes, writing was invented to solve the problems of memory. Had my story been scripted and written down, I’d have an exact copy of what I said to compare the speech-to-text text, instead I’m relying on my own memory which is susceptible to error (Shaw, 2016).

I’ve never used speech-to-text technology before and have never spent time considering it. What has become very apparent to me is how poor it is at a means of a stand alone form of communication. In absence of an accompanying voice recording, we lose sense of tone, pacing, volume, and other conventions of storytelling. In absence of video recording we further lose gesture and facial expressions. In absence of a written script, we lose punctuation and flow. The rich details of communication are lost if we rely only on the raw transcriptions of speech-to-text technology.

If we’re just using the speech-to-text technology to analyze orality, which I think is the point of this task, the speech-to-text text reveals to us the spontaneous nature of orality which, in my case, would differ quite significantly from my written text. Specifically my written text would omit instances of repeated words, self corrections, filler words, and informal pronunciations/spellings. Likewise, I would have included much more detail in my written work. As Boroditsky (SAR, 2017) notes, when we speak we are only conveying a small portion of information and hoping that the listener fills in the gaps. I would say that this is true for my spontaneous oral story. I’ve only conveyed a small portion of information in my oral story, whereas I would have been more descriptive in my writing.  In chapter one of Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the word, Ong (2002) explains that as the technology of writing progressed it went from transcription of oral speeches to being produced specifically as written text. In other words, it went from being a method to record an instance of oral utterance to being used strictly to produce an idea in written form. The act of using language to produce a piece of written text changes the way we use language compared to using it to tell an oral story. To return to the work of Gnanadesikan (2009), she states, writing is a time machine, and to that end  I can copy and paste my writing exactly ad infinitum. However, having used the speech-to-text technology twice by retelling the same story, I can see that oral transmission of information differs from one telling to the next. Perhaps this quality of orality could be positioned as a problem that needs to be solved, yet this might also be a benefit of orality. Iseke and Moore (2011) discuss the transformations of oral stories to video, specifically in the context of Indigenous elders and traditional storytelling. Though their discussion focuses on video recordings, I think it can be extended to the idea of transforming a story from oral tradition to written form. According to Iseke and Moore (2011), when we restrict a story to video or text we lose out on the ability to modulate the story for the needs of our audience. Children, for example, may require a different version of a story compared to adults. Recording a story necessitates a more generic version of a story and eliminates nuance and complexity that comes from being able to make adjustments for a variety of audiences (Iseke and Moore, 2011). Indigenous storytellers have developed the skills needed to determine what an audience knows and to help decide context for their stories, this is quite distinct from what happens when we freeze a story in time by recording it.

Orality, compared to the written word, differs in quite numerous ways, from the language we adopt, to the formality of the story we tell, to the details we choose to share and everything in between. This is only a small discussion of those differences and certainly there is more to be said.  I’d be interested in knowing about the oral traditions in other families, the stories we pass down from generation to generation, and the needs we have to preserve them. As I write this in the bathroom while my 5 year old takes a bath, she is asking me to tell the story of when she was born. I’ve told this story to her before and she loves listening to it. I’ve never written it down.

Unscripted oral story captured by Microsoft Surface speech-to-text technology

References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (Vol. 25, pp.1-12). John Wiley & Sons.

Iseke, J., & Moore, S. (2011). Community-based indigenous digital storytelling with elders and youth. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35(4), 19-38. doi:10.17953/aicr.35.4.4588445552858866

Ong, W. J. (2002). The orality of language. In Orality and literacy : The technologizing of the word (pp. 5-15). Routledge.

SAR School for Advanced Research. (2017, June 7). Lera Boroditsky, How the languages we speak shape the ways we think [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg&t=516s

Shaw, J. 2016, August 8. What experts wish you knew about false memories. Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-experts-wish-you-knew-about-false-memories/

A flat lay of the items currently in or on my coat

In the winter my coat is my bag. I find the bulk of a warm winter coat gets in the way of comfortably carrying a bag. There are a few things that currently influence what I carry with me:

• I’m on education leave, so I don’t leave the house very regularly
• I live in a small, small town, which means I’m never far from home
• It’s the deep, cold part of winter
• I have a kid

I play a game with my friends called “mom pockets” and here are the rules: I randomly send a text saying “show me your mom pockets” and they have to send back whatever is currently in their pockets. I would argue that anyone who cares regularly for a young child knows that these pockets are paradoxically specific and random. There are usually rocks, food items, garbage, and other various and sundry. Although I do not have any rocks in my pockets at the moment, I think you can tell from my bag that I’m around a little kid often. There is a toy ring at the top centre and a kid’s mask on the bottom right. The fruit to go might also tip someone off. Most of my items in my pockets I don’t have a daily need for, with the exception of lip balm.

When I think about how these items might be considered “texts,” I think about all the ways in which we can ‘read’ the items for the clues they might give about who I am. Does carrying around two lip balms mean that I have really dry, cracked lips, and like to be prepared, or does it mean that I am absent minded and forgot that I already had one in my pocket. Does the hand warmer package mean that I live somewhere cold or that I get cold easily or that I just carry garbage around with me because I’m forgetful and don’t clean out my pockets?

Here is what I think these things say about me:

I think that what I carry in my pockets seems objectively practical and no frills. I have my mask and my kid’s mask, because as we all know it’s a pandemic out there. Plus these masks might be a dead giveaway to an archeologist of the temporal period I’m living in. I have lip balm, because I have cracked lips (and yes, there are two because I forgot that I had one in my pocket already).  There is also some cash, my wallet, a pad, a snack, and the arm band at the top is a light so I’m visible walking around.

If I tell you that I live in the arctic, the items start to make even more sense. The cold, dark, desert climate might explain even better the reason for the lip balm, arm band light, and hand warmers. Also, the beading on the wallet and the key chain reflects the traditional Indigenous artwork of my community. A former student beaded the wallet and a neighbour beaded the key chain.  These items might also help an archeologist narrow down the location in which I live.

As for text technologies and literacies, I’m not sure there is much information held in my pockets. Perhaps some indication of financial literacy and maybe visual literacy with respect to the bead work.  The text is limited and consists of digitally printed packaging. The key fob has some printed symbols on it as well as the money. The contents of my pockets I don’t think are a good reflection of who I am or who I outwardly project to be. There are some superficial indications of who I am, for instance, the pad might indicate that I’m a woman, or at least someone who menstruates, and the kid related stuff might indicate that I’m a mom or care for a kid, the car keys maybe let you know that I’m at minimum old enough to drive. However, my pockets don’t say anything about my nuanced feelings on parenting, or my experiences of being a woman, or the anxiety I feel when I drive.  There is nothing in my pockets to indicate any other relationships in my life or any of the hobbies, likes, or dislikes that I may have.

Can you tell who I am from these pockets? Do you think other people can tell who you are from yours?

As prompted by our course, and further to my own initial thoughts of what “text” and “technology” mean, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “text” as anything written or printed and includes words, phrases, and sentences. However, the OED  does not mention other visuals. I wonder whether or not most people would include images, specifically graphs or diagrams, as “text.” Interestingly, related words such as texture and textile refer to weaving and fabric which, to me, has an obvious relationship with our common metaphors for narratives, such as weaving a story, or spinning a tale. Like Jonathan Berkowitz notes in his segment The Word Guy on CBC’s North by Northwest (Mackay, 2020), original definitions for words serve as metaphors for new definitions of words. In this case, the Latin word that “text” is derived from, means to weave. With respect to the OED definitions of technology and related words (technical, technique, technocracy) what stood out to me in the definitions were words like “specialized,” “particular,” “elite” and “experts.” I do think that there is a general idea that concepts related to technology are too complicated for general audiences to understand and that there seems to be a silo of information within the technology sector. Does the average person know how the internet works? Or how a computer works? I think of images of people vaguely gesturing around them when mentioning ‘the cloud.’

In Google’s NGram viewer I put in technology, text, and progress. I included the word progress because I had tied that idea to technology in my first post. Below are my results:

I’m very surprised by the results. I would have predicted that the use of the word technology would have increased during the Industrial Revolution, yet instead their are two small spikes in the early 16th century followed by no use until the 1950s. I wonder if the steady increase in the word starting in the 1950s is due to the establishment of the field of computer science. I also wonder if there is any relationship to the genre of science fiction. I suspect that as technology, as a consumable product, became more readily available in households, so to did the use of the word. The word “text” follows an interesting trajectory. Like another classmate, Carlo Trentadue (2021), mentioned in his post, perhaps the spikes in the word text in the 16th century are related to the invention of the printing press in the previous century. At least according to Wikipedia (“Printing press”, n.d.), the printing press spread across Europe through the 1500s. In The Word Guy podcast, Jonathan Berkowitz notes that the word “text” was used during Shakespeare’s time (end of the 1500s, early 1600s) to mean a style of handwriting. If I had to hazard a guess explaining the spike in the word “text” toward the late 1990s/early 2000s, I would put my money on the rise of SMS text messaging. According to Mashable (Erickson, 2012) the first text was sent in 1992 and Nokia became the first company to create a phone with texting capabilities in 1997.

Lastly, despite initially tying together the idea of technology and progress, the two words have opposing trajectories.

References

Erickson, C. (2012, September 21). A brief history of text messaging. Mashable. https://mashable.com/2012/09/21/text-messaging-history/

MacKay, S. (Host). (2020, April). [Radio episode]. In North by Northwest. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-43-north-by-northwest.

I admit I checked out synonyms for “text” (idea) and synonyms for “technology” (machinery) and that’s how the site name came to be. When I think about what the word ‘text’ means to me, I conjure up thoughts of printed images. In that sense text is anything that is visually consumed in digital or printed form (although, in saying that, it feels like ablest terminology and I’m going to have reflect on that). Examples of text would include words, graphs, tables, and pictures. With respect to technology, I immediately think of modern examples of technology such as computers, however I also think about technology being any tool or resource that changes the way we engage with a task or object. I think that technology is sometimes associated with the idea of progress, but I personally have always been uncomfortable with the concept of progress when the values and worldviews associated with that idea aren’t problematized. I’m looking forward to reflecting, expanding, and critiquing my understanding of text technologies and their relationship to reading and writing while working through this course ETEC 540 Text Technologies: The changing spaces of reading and writing.