Dickens on shorthand

Through some googling I accidentally discovered a lovely paragraph from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield on shorthand. For  journalism students in strange and largely British tracts of the world who are forced to learn the half-maddening, but vital, skill of stenography  I thought this passage might be poignant if not a little funny.

I must note as an unfortunate aside that I have not read much Dickens (dust continues to accumulate on a copy of A Tale of Two Cities I picked up from the Salvation Army two years ago), I understand the main character of David Copperfield, like the author himself, learns shorthand to cover parliament. I thought this was an apt description of adjusting to the odd language, regardless of which strain of shorthand you happen to be learning.

From the beginning of chapter 38:

I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence) ; and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself theio then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it: then, beginning again, I forgot them ; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system: in short, it was almost heart-breaking.

Bad craziness.

The revolution will be televised

Jennifer Lush of Editor’s Weblog makes an interesting point that despite the rise of blogging among the unwashed masses, there’s a hole in video blogging that journalists can exploit:

Video blogging, quite simply a blog which employs video as its medium, is a phenomenon which hasn’t shown the same success as its text-based parent amongst everyday web users. Despite the fact the ‘tools of the trade’ – cameras, editing software, and a platform to broadcast – are no longer unaffordable or complex obstacles, the significant investment of time to produce something that is of a publishable quality is still a drawback for many.

She says that while any man with a decent command of language and a fresh perspective can out blog a trained journalist, it’s a lot harder to out video-blog someone who is trained and experienced in video.

As the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words, and journalists should take advantage of the skills they already have, with some modifications for the online audience, and make the most of the void in the video blogging market.

In related news, the Telegraph’s report that Twitter was about to launch video blogging turned out to bogus.