New Now Know How

Proof-editing may well be the most boring thing I have done for my thesis.

At least I didn’t have to proof-read the thing.

Urgh.

Also: is it strange that none of the default LaTeX bibliography styles present the bibliography itself in the form: Surname, Firstname, (year).? Hooray for custom-bib which is a clunky, command-line menu-driven way to make BST files. It sure beats writing a BST yourself.

I’m not sure if I’m back at this yet. But at least my thesis looks like a thesis now and is being proofread as we speak and will have a final sanity-check from my supervisors eventually.

Then I’ll submit.

Then I’ll move back to QLD.

Then I’ll start my new job. (!) Awesome.

I’m busy finishing my thesis.

Can’t blog. Writing.

Back later.

I use LaTeX to write my thesis in. Like C, it’s user friendly, but picky about who its friends are.

Recently, I’ve been fighting with LaTeX over using the pdftex processor but only while at uni. It worked at home, but not at uni. At uni, to produce PDFs from LaTeX I had to go through the dvips processor. Normally this was not a problem, however, pdftex has the lovely property of being able to insert .jpeg, .png and other graphics formats as pictures, rather than the limited support that dvips offers for .eps graphics files only. When I tried to use pdftex at uni, it would fail with:

! LaTeX Error: There’s no line here to end.

I had put the fact that I could only make pdftex work at home down to some weirdness in the installation of my LaTeX implemention here at uni. However, I was able, recently, to use pdftex to compile a file that was on my flashdrive but I was unable to compile a file that was on my networked drive. Why? Why? Why?

After a small amount of banging my head against the wall, the solution became apparent.

Googling for that error message let me to the TeXFAQ for no line here to end which told me that the error:

comes in reaction to you giving LaTeX a \\ command at a time when it’s not expecting it.

I wasn’t giving any \\ commands as far as I knew! I was at the point of creating LaTeX files of the “Hello World” sort before the penny dropped.

The networked drive I use is (obviously) mapped to a drive letter. It’s also mapped to “My Documents”. I was opening the file from “My Documents”. Apparently, “My Documents” is a convenient fiction that all programs see as a full path. In windows, the path to a mapped drive is “\\name\of\server\to\users\path”. Notice the (un)helpful “\\” at the beginning of that path?

Solution? Open the file from the pseudo-name given to the mapped drive, that is “h:”.

Arrrgh!

Occaisionally these emails come around the uni email lists:

We will be running a workshop exploring how to use Word efficiently with long documents. The workshop will look at the various functions you might want to us when writing a thesis, mainly related to formatting the document to avoid having a document that seems to have its own life.

I love LaTeX.

Wow.

It’s a very basic thing at the moment but it’s got a title page, table of contents, chapters and a bibliography.

It’s so dodgy at the moment I’m not even willing to consider it a 1st draft but it’ll do for sending to my supervisors and seeing if it hangs together at all. It doesn’t even have a full introduction yet, and probably all of the chapters could be 25% to 50% longer than they are. I hope it’s more like 25%.

I’ve realised:

• that I’ve been really lazy when it comes to putting references in, given the stringy nature of my bibliography;
• I might need at least one “interlude” chapter to explain various jumps;
• I obviously didn’t understand LaTeX when I started writing because there are times when I’ve skipped entire heading levels;
• I might need a whole big section in my penultimate chapter to account for a great new idea I’ve had recently.

Yay.

Here’s my thesis abstract. Comments appreciated even (especially) if you have no idea what I’m on about.

Speech recognition software is often thought of as a easy to use interface that allows a person to talk to a computer instead of controlling it using their hands. Using speech recognition software is often presented in terms of “talk instead of typing”. Presenting speech recognition software as a simple matter of talking instead of typing ignores the difficulties involved in actually using large vocabulary speech recognition software in a productive work environment. This thesis began with the question: what would a speech recognition application for use live in the courtroom of the ACT Magistrates Court look like? To answer this question, a second question had to be asked and a thesis that I originally though would be a software design and implementation project became an ethnographically inspired one: What does productive use of speech recognition look currently like? Investigating the use of speech recognition software and discovering what made it usable became the focus of this project. This investigation led me to another shift in my thinking. When I started this project I thought that the usability of any technology was contained within the technology itself - that usability was inherent. Having investigated a particularly difficult-to-use technology I now believe that the usability or usefulness of any software product resides in the complex interaction of many factors both internal and external to a particular software product.

The basis of this research is two ethnographically inspired studies. In the first study, I observed and interviewed speech recognition users about their use of commercial off-the-shelf speech recognition software in various public service departments. Of the eight interviewees, six had some form of occupational over use injury and one was no-longer working. The major conclusion of that study is that the productive use of speech recognition software is dependant on many factors external to the software mainly contained within the work that is being performed and the environment in which the work is taking place. The second study concerned observing and describing part of the work process of the ACT Magistrates Court involved in sentencing. In this study I interviewed and observed many workers at the Court including Magistrates, Associates, Clerks and other people involved in the sentencing process. The outcome of the study of the Court was to recognise the sentencing process as one distributed in space and time between a large number of people rather than one that is performed by a single Magistrate sitting on the bench.

This thesis presents:

• A descriptive analysis of the use of speech recognition in two public service departments
• A descriptive analysis of the work of sentencing in the ACT Magistrates Court
• A novel design specification for a speech recognition system for the Court
• An approach to using various sociological approaches to study software and its use. In doing so I have shown that it is possible to use established theories from sociology to work with technology rather than inventing new approaches.
• A re-consideration of usability as contingent upon context.