Volume 41New Approaches to Shorthand

10 October 2024

Photo: De Gruyter

As the first ever peer-reviewed volume on the subject, the new volume of SMC presents a much-needed introduction to shorthand and its history, alongside eight contributions by specialists that showcase some of the many lines of inquiry that shorthand inspires across a range of perspectives.

Presumably speaking from their own experience, editors Hannah Boeddeker and Kelly Minot McCay note in the preface of the new volume that ‘reading a shorthand manuscript can be onerous, speculative, and often thankless task.’ Several factors make it a laborious exercise. First of all, the number of systems and variants is so great that saying that a text is written in shorthand is hardly more informative than saying that an utterance was made in a language. Worse still, shorthand systems offer their users countless possibilities for individual adaptation. Thus, potential readers will need a great deal of patience. And is it worth the effort? Aren’t manuscripts written in shorthand usually just hastily scribbled notes without long-term significance?

The answer of the two editors, presented in the form of the recently published anthology, is an emphatic yes, it is worth it. Over the last two thousand years, shorthand has played a multifaceted and instructive role in a variety of different manuscript cultures; nevertheless, and probably not least because of the inaccessibility of this technique, it has been almost unanimously neglected by research. In fact, this book is the first comprehensive peer-reviewed volume devoted entirely to the subject of shorthand.

Given the abundance of material, this disregard is regrettable: The trove of shorthand manuscripts includes documents such as private letters, secret diaries, calligraphical exercises, sermon notes, and records of parliamentary debates. In fact, in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, shorthand played a significant role in making the proceedings of the newly created parliaments transparent, thereby establishing their legitimacy. The fact that it was not just a makeshift solution that quickly became obsolete with new recording technologies is evident from the fact that parliamentary debates in the German Bundestag, for example, are recorded in shorthand to this day.

Although one of the main reasons why people wrote and continue to write in shorthand is undoubtedly that it is faster than standard writing systems, it would be mistaken to look at shorthand manuscripts solely from this point of view. Depending on the context, it could also be used to save space or to protect the content of what was written from unwanted attention. Erich Kästner, for example, who was banned from his profession during the Third Reich, recorded his everyday observations of Nazi Germany in a diary written in shorthand. In other cases, users of shorthand were interested in intellectual or linguistic experiments. In one of the contributions to the volume, for instance, Alfred W. Cramer argues that the linguistic relationship between stenographic pen strokes and the sounds of speech parallels and illuminates aspects of German Romantic music.

New Approaches to Shorthand: Studies of a Writing Technology, which is the 41st volume of the book series Studies in Manuscript Cultures, demonstrates vividly how much there is to discover once researchers start to look deeper into this writing practice. Many of the contributions are based on two workshops at the CSMC, one in February 2021, the second one in March 2022. Like almost all volumes of the series, the book is available open access on the publisher’s website.