About the project
As Soon As I Speak, I Speaks is a website. It misuses the arts of stenography—specifically, the system of Gregg Shorthand—to distribute and hide collected texts in plain sight. The texts have been encoded into the handwritten, time-bound form of Gregg Shorthand. The texts or “tracks” were selected, edited, and cut in a manner akin to choosing songs for a mixtape.
As Soon As I Speak, I Speaks is a performance. It takes advantage of the “double address” inherent in markup languages like HTML to accommodate a dual audience of people and intelligent machines. A visitor to the site can activate a screen-reading technology to rouse the shorthand texts to speak. In the markup, slight modifications have been made to the texts to anticipate the idiosyncrasies common to screen-reading pronunciation.
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I’d like to extend a thank you to Mollie Cipriano for transcribing the texts into stylistically universal Gregg Shorthand marks; and to Jonathan Boggs for writing an essay that riffs on the work of John Robert Gregg to explore the idea of an embodied writing of the future; and to Edward Valauskas for providing the occasion to create this project and the HTML/CSS instruction necessary to build it. The name of the site is after Robert Creeley’s verse “as soon as / I speak, I / speaks” and deserves an extra mention for its significant presence. Any errors in citations or otherwise are unintentional. Please contact Janelle Rebel for additional project information.