Forum du petit sténographe

mttiro · Inscrit le: 27 Sep 2011 Messages: 969

August Hermann Francke avait mis sur pied une équipe de transcripteurs pour noter ses sermons. Voici une description de ces « chœurs d’écriture » par Ann Blair, 2008.

« The quest for accurate full-text notes took an elaborate form in some 18th-century cases of oral delivery at rates of regular speech. A method for coordinating note-taking in teams was devised in Halle by the pietist educator August Hermann Francke (1663-1727) to record his own sermons, then also used in university lectures, notably in Kant's Königsberg in the late 18th century. Given the detail with which he described his method Francke clearly perceived his invention to be new, though it is possible that note-taking in teams had existed in other earlier contexts.

In a report to a visitation of 1700 Francke described the procedure by which he collected written versions of his sermons in order to print them "so that they stay longer in the memory of our listeners." Since Francke spoke without relying on notes of his own, he relied on note-taking by listeners, as Bernard of Clairvaux or Huldrych Zwingli had in earlier generations. Ostensibly unhappy with the results of note-taking by one person Francke described how he relied on a team of 8-10, or even better 16 "studiosi" to take down his words accurately and fully.

The note-takers would sit together in a section of the church and each take down in turn as many words as they could without straining their memory, before signaling to the next member of the team to pick up where he left off. Each note-taker would write down text fragments, usually not a complete sentence but 8-10 words, on narrow half-sheets of paper written. The text fragments were each numbered 1-10 and the sheets were labelled with letters A,B,C and so on. The resulting Mitschriften could thus span many sheets kept by each writer whose turn, Francke estimates, would come up 60 or 70 times in the course of a sermon. To make a coherent clean copy would require careful coordination of all the items on each of the writers' sheets of notes.

[suivent des détails techniques]

This elaborate technique has been called a "Schreibechor" ("writing chorus"). Though Francke invented it for his Stiftungen, the practice can also be documented later elsewhere, whether it was developed separately or spread from Halle. For example Francke described witnessing in 1718 twelve students recording a sermon at the cathedral of Ulm which lasted 118 minutes.91 Furthermore, just as medieval reportationes spread from sermons to university lectures, so too in 18th-century Germany the Schreibechor technique spread to some university contexts.

In particular team note-taking yielded full-text notes of Kant's lectures on anthropology which Kant first delivered at the University of Königsberg in 1772 but which were only published in 1798. In the intervening years student manuscripts of the course circulated and were available for sale.92 Although no Mitschriften are preserved from these lectures, the manuscripts indicate that they were "written by a society of listeners" or "gathered by" one person from the notes of multiple students.93 Only further research will tell whether this case was a rare occurrence, for example due to the presence of a pietist student who was able transmit the Halle technique to the classroom, or indicative of a more widespread practice, for example in Prussian universities.

One work of Hegel's is also known primarily through student notes--his Lectures on the philosophy of religion delivered at the University of Berlin in the 1820s.94 Scholars have considered whether students worked in teams or individually using stenography (which was developed for German ca. 1834). The surviving Mitschriften of Hegel's lectures present many incomplete sentences and the Reinschriften include free reformulations of the lectures, made with the help of the notes of more than one student working individually. The team-work, if any, was apparently not successful in capturing the complete text and was probably limited to pooling notes after they had been taken rather than taking them in a "Schreibechor." Hegel reportedly used one set of Reinschriften (likely based on the notes of more than one listener) from his lectures of 1824 as the basis from which he prepared his own notes for the lectures of 1827.

Others who have edited professorial courses from student notes similarly describe the challenges of coping with the variations and gaps that resulted from note-taking "modo notabiliorum"--that practice still familiar today at lectures and conferences which can be traced back to reportationes of the middle ages and its ancient antecedents ».

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/29674920/blair%202008%20student%20manuscripts%20and%20textbook%20for%20DASH.pdf?sequence=1

mttiro · Inscrit le: 27 Sep 2011 Messages: 969

Équipe de « reportatores » au XVe siècle à Florence.

« From the surviving evidence (notably multiple reportationes extant from the same sermon) we know that the reportators could not take down a sermon word for word.16 Many used a faster, smaller hand and supplemented standard abbreviations with their own personal ones.

Reportators did not try to record the full text of a sermon; they identified the gist of the argument and its divisions, leaving quotations, exempla and explanations to be filled in later. They also typically recorded in Latin sermons delivered in the vernacular. Different reportationes of the same sermon therefore often highlight different aspects of the sermon, some of which (e.g. an exemplum, or statements about current affairs) might not be included in the written version circulated by the sermon-writer himself.

Finally, reportators could help one another after the fact by sharing notes, or, in the case of a 15th-century Florentine confraternity, by taking notes as a team; perhaps such methods were behind the one set of reportationes which claimed to offer a word-for-word account of a sermon ».

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/29674920/blair%202008%20student%20manuscripts%20and%20textbook%20for%20DASH.pdf?sequence=1