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How do you decode .sgstn stenograph stenonote?

2 points by theszak ↗ HN
How do you decode the .sgstn stenograph stenonote of the public stenographic record of the Public Meetings of Boston City Council. The public stenographic record of Public Meetings is made available in .sgstn stenograph stenonote not full plain English text.

2 comments

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DanBC
1) Boston City council may have some legal requirement to make these files available to people with disabilities under some disabilities law. You could contact a group for people with hearing impairment to ask for their advice.

2) I remember when you used to be able to search for a file extension and get useful information. Now I search and I get useless, hopeless, results. Really awful. SEO has poisoned the WWW and search engines are not doing a good enough job of repairing that damage. :-(

2b) Doing a websearch returns many posts made to various forums asking for this media to be made open. Perhaps these are all from the same person on a campaign.

3) You could buy the software, and load the files. (Also, possibly export them to an open format?)

4) You could ask someone at Bountify to create a file-reader for you. (https://bountify.co/) Make sure to leave good information, and an easy link to one of these files.

5) You could ask the makers of the machine to create a simple, limited feature, reader for the files. They don't appear to have one at their website. (http://www.stenograph.com/pages.aspx?docid=757&id=40001)

6) You could investigate Open Source - Plover (http://plover.stenoknight.com/) might be able to convert the software. Or maybe someone could add conversion routines to it.

theszak
The issue is now getting the dictionary file used by the Boston City Council stenographer (or re-creating it, by matching the decoded steno "chords" to what's spoken during the video of the Council meeting).