New Search - HELP

[Susan Higginbotham]

(07-30-2016 08:02 AM)L Verge Wrote:  I think we also need to remember that what we are taking as verbatim statements of what the people involved in this investigation and subsequent trial said are really transcriptions of what recorders thought they heard, interpreted, put on paper, and then transcribed (often late at night after the day had worn their brains to nubbins). No technology to help capture the exact statements.

For me, it would be torture akin to death to ask me to compare - word for word - what Pitman, Poore, and Peterson volumes left for posterity. I suspect that we would find a lot of differences, even omitted sections, within those three versions.

Excellent point. I do some Social Security disability appellate work, which entails looking at a lot of transcripts from hearings averaging about 30 minutes. For these, the court reporters are working off audio and/or video recordings, and they record the proceedings verbatim. With some of the claimants, particularly the poorly educated ones and the ones who ramble and go off onto tangents when asked the most straightforward of questions, one can only make an educated guess at their meaning. I wouldn't relish the task of trying to render their answers into standard English and removing the "noise" in order to make the proceedings intelligible, as did the court reporters at the trials we're dealing with.