2026-09-12 –, Schengenraum - A213 Language: English
A short introduction to (machine) stenography for the curious, and a meetup for everyone already familiar.
Machine stenography is used in contexts where it is important to transcribe texts in real time, i.e. maximising words per minute. Instead of a "normal" keyboard, a stenography keyboard has fewer keys, on which whole words are chorded at a time. But it can also be useful to reduce hand strain, or just a fun input method to explore.
We will give a short introductory presentation on how machine stenography works (using the freely available Plover theory [1]; unfortunately there is no good free theory for German input), and we'll also bring some hardware so you can try it out for yourself. If you want to do so on your own laptop, you'll first need to install Plover [2]; but we'll also have an old thinkpad or two for tryout purposes.
Also feel free to come if you're already familiar with steno! We're looking forward to seeing what kind of hardware & theories others are using, so do bring your things ^^
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[1] https://plover.wiki/index.php/Plover_Wiki
[2] https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover
likes fun math, formalised logic, and uncommon input methods.
meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow~~
TL;DR: Just someone deeply into stenography, coffee, as well as low-level & functional programming
I've been doing machine stenography (on and off) for a few years now; and have definitely developed a passion for it. I have a few machines that I've collected over those years to do steno with; and love sharing this hobby of mine - not just because it's interesting, but also potentially helpful - there's a good amount of people in the stenography sphere who've learned it because of carpal tunnel for example, since it requires much less finger movement.