I have been using speech recognition software to transcribe the oodles of citations that I have highlighted in various texts regarding Maxine Greene, existentialism and phenomenology. I'm presently attempting to organize the pages of citations into data fields using a framework that assigns to them subject areas of situatedness, embodiment and aesthetics.
Not surprisingly, the speech recognition isn't perfect in transcribing what I think I'm reading aloud into accurate text documents. This is due to a number of factors: my misreading of the text (some of which includes Greek and French references); my increasingly twangy speech patterns (the western twang I was born into is intensifying with age); and the unreadability of the text itself.
This "unreadability" is embedded in the fact that some of these texts were not written to be spoken aloud. You may think that this then makes the texts "unspeakable." But I think it ultimately makes them unreadable as well. Shouldn't all writing take into account readability and speak-ability? Shouldn't writing have an awareness of where the breath should occur? Shouldn't writing take into account the "mouth feel" of the language? Shouldn't writing be a soliloquy?
Interestingly, the speech recognition software accurately transcribed all of the Greene references within the citations I dictated. Greene's writing can be spoken. This comes as no surprise as I had recently unearthed from the cellar my notes from the graduate courses I had taken with Maxine. Reading those notes from 1994-96 was like reading a draft of "Releasing the Imagination," which was published at the same time. Her lectures are readable and her writing is worthy of a soliloquy.
In my prospectus for my disseration I wrote that I wanted my work to be readable. That determination has not waned!
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