The Shorthand Mysteries: with Dr. Claire Wood & Prof. Hugo Bowles

Are you an unsung codebreaker? Does your knowledge and feel for Dickens mean that you could be the next person to crack some of the hieroglyphic mystery of the shorthand system that Dickens created for himself. Or are you able to trace the source of the writings that Dickens read from whilst dictating to his pupil Arthur Stone …?

A year ago Dominic caught up with Dr. Claire Wood & Prof. Hugo Bowles on their extraordinary Dickens Code project. Since they last spoke,  Claire and Hugo have not only won the Research Project of the Year: Times Higher Education Award but have now - for the very first time - pooled all of Dickens’ surviving shorthand manuscripts into one place in a special online exhibition entitled - Decoding Dickens: The Shorthand Mysteries … 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Dickens Code Online Exhibition Discovery

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Hi everyone. I have a question for you. Are you an unsung codebreaker? Does your knowledge and feel for Dickens mean that you could be the next person to crack some of the hieroglyphic mystery of the shorthand system that Dickens created for himself? Or are you able to trace the source of the writings that Dickens read from whilst dictating to his pupil Arthur Stone? A year ago, I caught up with Dr. Clare Wood and Professor Hugo Bowles on their extraordinary Dickens Code project. Since we last spoke, they not only won the Research Project of the Year Times Higher Education Award, but have now, for the very first time, pulled all of Dickens's surviving shorthand manuscripts into one place in a special online exhibition entitled Decoding Dickens The Shorthand Mysteries. There is a link in the description wherever you're listening to this. Hello, Claire, and hello Hugo, and welcome back to Charles Dickens A Brain on Fire. It's so great to have you both back again.

SPEAKER_03 1:20

It's our pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Are you in Italy, Hugo, at the moment? Are you the University of Foggia still?

SPEAKER_03 1:26

I've retired, but I am It's E and enjoying it's still nice and warm, a nice sunny day. Yes, we've been busy on the shorthand exhibition, so that really has kept us occupied over the summer.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Yes, so this is this is why you're both here, and it's fantastic. We had our episode last year on the Dickens Code, and now as I understand it, there's this special online exhibition. So many listeners to this podcast are from America, so they can come to the exhibition by just clicking on the link in the description here. But I wondered if you could both tell us a little bit about what this exhibition is and also possibly any discoveries that have occurred since we last spoke, I think in October last year.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Sure. So really we wanted to do this exhibition as a culminating point for the Dickens Code to mark the end of its funded phase and also to just celebrate all of the people and organizations who have been involved and share everything that we've been learning along the way. So if people come along to our exhibition, it's at Dickenscode.omeka.net, they'll find something which traces the role of shorthand in Dickens' life right from his teenage years when he was grappling with this fiendish system that he describes in David Copperfield through to his use of shorthand in various professional and personal settings. We also get this insight into Dickens as a shorthand teacher and start to think a bit about well, how does he compare with those great fictional teachers he talks about? Alongside this, you can look at all of the transcripts that the brilliant Dickens decoders have been working on since 2021, so all over this life cycle of the project. Alongside, may I say, Dominic, some rather lovely audio recordings as well.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Thank you. Yes, that was really fun. And the readings are really interesting as well, aren't they? Just I particularly love, well, just jumping around a bit randomly, but I love the reminiscence from Henry Fielding Dickens about learning shorthand from his father, Charles.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah, that is such a lovely section of the exhibition, I think, because we really get this insight through the various shorthand records and different libraries and archives that Dickens left behind. But we get this sense of what Dickens was like as a teacher. He has a few pupils through the years. We know a bit more about two of them: Arthur Stone, who leaves this record of notebooks at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and then his own son, Henry Dickens, who is perhaps a less successful pupil than Arthur, would we say, Hugo? Certainly when he's reflecting about the lessons, they they sound like they were more fun than actually productive of any learning.

SPEAKER_03 4:07

Yeah, we don't really know about Henry much, about his shorthand. Um he doesn't say whether he learnt anything or not, and there isn't any of his shorthand that survived. So we don't really know. But he had a great time with his dad just dictating stuff to him and then kind of improvising the dictation. So they they both ended up laughing because Dickens, of course, goes off on a rant about something. So it's it's hard to know.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

These lessons were great fun, though I found it was by no means an easy science to learn. To take down a speech quickly and correctly you must have all your faculties in perfect order, and that is where I experienced a special difficulty in my own case. This arose from the kind of speeches which my father delivered for me to practice on, speeches which shortly reduced my mind to a state of wild confusion. They were of the character you would expect from a street tub orator, or from a speaker on the Hustings, or a parody of orations in the House of Commons. These soon reduced me almost to a state of collapse in consequence of the laughter which followed on them. And when I say laughter, I mean laughter on the part of both of us, for he himself, tickled by the ridiculous nature of his own fancies, gave way to fits of laughter only equaled by wild bursts on my part.

SPEAKER_03 5:34

He was certainly, I think, a bit more serious with Arthur, his other pupil, because Arthur, his father had just died, and Dickens was teaching him shorthand because he need obviously needed a bit of extra money uh reporting. So there was a more serious side to that, and I can imagine Dickens taking it a bit more seriously. But the thing about Henry was that it just shows also with his children he he is not the greatest father, perhaps, but you can see his uh humour coming out in this episode, and that the side of Dickens that was obviously great fun and very theatrical. So there's there's really lots in there in this reading.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Yeah, I find it quite affecting, really. I think it's a really nice little window there, isn't there, into Dickens as a good dad, the good sides of him. I know he's a complex character, isn't he? We know that. Um, and Dickens' own flights of fancy occurring in the moment, which I wondered about this Henry Fielding Dickens one, whether that leads you possibly both to conclude that a lot of what's written in these shorthand notebooks are Dickens himself. Because that was always the thing that was quite hard to work out was whether or not he was reading from something, or whether or not he was just reeling off something off the top of his head.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Yes, and this remains, I think, um, a real key question at the heart of our ongoing investigations. Sometimes we can see, this is in the Free Library of Philadelphia notebooks, the Arthur Stone notebooks, there are a couple of examples that very directly are being read aloud from a book off of the shelf. Um it's often Sidney Smith and it's, you know, philosophical meditation. So we know that that was one method that Dickens was using, but we can also see from this other evidence that he was so drawn, as you're saying, Dominic, to creativity, to flights of fancy. He makes it fun in David Copperfield. But certainly with his learners coming up with fun practice examples that are working in a lot of the symbols that are really fundamental to mastering brachiography.

SPEAKER_02 7:30

Yeah, and and those David Copperfield examples are so fun, aren't they? In our previous episode, which everyone needs to go back to listen to if you haven't. We talked a lot about the process of David trying to learn the symbols, these these amazing symbols, but I love the moment where Tradles comes in to test him. I resorted to Tradles for advice, who suggested that he should dictate speeches to me at a pace, and with occasional stoppages adapted to my weakness. Very grateful for this friendly aid, I accepted the proposal, and night after night, almost every night for a long time, we had a sort of private parliament in Buckingham Street. I should like to see such a parliament anywhere else. My aunt and Mr Dick represented the government or the opposition, as the case might be, and Tradles, with the assistance of Enfield speakers or a volume of parliamentary orations, funded astonishing invectives against them. Standing by the table with his finger in the page to keep the place, and his right arm flourishing above his head, Traddles, as Mr Pitt, Mr Fox, Mr Sheridan, Mr Burke, Lord Castlereagh, Viscount Sidmouth, or Mr Canning, would work himself into the most violent heats and deliver the most withering denunciations of the profligacy and corruption of my aunt and Mr Dick, while I used to sit, at a little distance with my notebook on my knee, fagging after him with all my might and mane. Often and often we pursued these debates until the clock pointed to midnight,

Dickens's Use of Shorthand and Source

SPEAKER_02 8:59

and the candles were burning down. The result of so much good practice was that by and by I began to keep pace with Tradles pretty well, and should have been quite triumphant if I had had the least idea what my notes were about. But as to reading them after I had got them, I might as well have copied the Chinese inscriptions of an immense collection of tea chests, or the golden characters on all the great red and green bottles in the chemist shop.

SPEAKER_03 9:29

You're right. He does try to make it fun in David Copperfield, I think because it really wasn't fun for him. I mean, he talks as at one of his letters he talks about the moping solitude of chambers. And that is when he was on his own, sitting in an office, transcribing his notes that he'd taken in court. If you're in court, say for a couple of hours, just writing, writing, writing, transcribing into shorthand, you go back to your office and then you've got to write it out in long hand. That takes about three or four hours on your own, no one to help you, you're just stuck. And if you get stuck because you can't read your shorthand because it's so difficult, it's a lonely place. And I think he found it very lonely. So it's good to have someone like Tradles along there. You know, he'd have gone back to his family, and his family also would would probably have helped him because he was in Norfolk Street, which is the f the first time that the Dickens family in the 1820s had been kind of reunited because they were sort of a bit dispersed around London when Charles when his father was being pursued for debts. And eventually they all got together in Norfolk Street, and that was when Dickens was about 16. Um, and I sort of get the impression that that was a good time for him, and his father knew the shorthand and his uncle, so there was that kind of social aspect, the shorthand, which you need in order to be able to learn it. I think he found that at home, and I think he probably transmitted that to his pupils as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

There's such rich detail in that scene as well. In the exhibition, we reproduced that beautiful plate of tradles making a figure in parliament, and you can see the figures there. And in the exhibition, you can just see some. We've picked out some of the details that people can look at, which show a real depth of knowledge of shorthand. There's all of these coded references in that image, and you can find out more about those in the exhibition.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Do you have favourite moments in this exhibition, favorite excerpts?

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Well, I think one of the things that I really love is in this final section, section six, we turn to the history of the decoding attempts, and there's some material there that I think most people will never have seen. It was digitized by the Charles Dickens Museum. It's from the papers of the great scenographer William Carlton, and you see some of the letters where Carlton, just like we did in the 21st century, but he was working back in the mid-20th century, is corresponding with people and trying to work out what some of these letters have to say. And they're having a pretty tricky time of it. So you get this idea of how we're we're following in the footsteps, following in this longer tradition of trying to crack Dickens' fiendish shorthand script.

SPEAKER_03 12:13

Yeah, I would agree with that. And there's also another thing that I really like that I hope that are the people who come to the exhibition will like and will actually go into because we need help, and people who come to the exhibition will be able to help us, is with the sources of the shorthand texts. And that's in the part of the exhibition, which is where the exhibited shorthand is. There's a part when we talk about Dickens' life and shorthand and his life, and a part when we talk about the actual exhibits and their transcription. And in the exhibits, you can read the transcriptions of everything that we've transcribed so far. And as we've already been saying, there are some of these texts we know where they come from, and some of them we actually don't. You know, if they're being dictated, what are they being dictated from? And could it be Dickens improvising? So it's worth reading these and asking yourself could this be something that Dickens might have dictated? Like off the top of his head. There's one, for example, that I always like, which is Nelson, which is a description of the death of Nelson, which I think a lot of people who will come to the exhibition will know a bit about. They might have read an account of it before. And here is the version that Arthur Stone took down in shorthand, possibly from Dickens' dictation. So where's this coming from? This this account of Nelson's death. Is Dickens just kind of improvising it from something he's he knows? It's a story he knows, so he's just sort of telling the story. Is he reading it from a book?

SPEAKER_02 13:47

Yes, it's interesting that Nelson one, isn't it? Because that opening sentence There are some circumstances connected with the death of Nelson, which are always interesting, as having in them a kind of alternative picture of the events of the day. That sounds a bit textual, doesn't it? But then a kind of would you say having in them a kind of alternative picture of the day? It seems a little bit colloquial, suddenly in the midst of all that.

SPEAKER_03 14:13

Exactly. Very good point. And it's a question, is it maybe he's doing both? Maybe he's reading a bit and then he's kind of going off on it on a tangent and then coming back to his text.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

I'd never thought of that. So he's he's actually reading the text and then throwing in a few extra comments on the side in the margins kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:31

It could be. So there's no there's no real answer to this, but it's a nice question to ask yourself for people who like Dickens, as all the people listening to this podcast obviously do. Um, you know, is this a Dickensy thing? You know, does this sound like him or is it just uh just something he's reading?

SPEAKER_02 14:48

Do you think that story in that Nelson extract, do you think that carries any historical weight at all? Does it give us any more as a source for what for the battle itself? Or is that a is that a very too far-reaching question? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

I would say to me, this looks much more like it has been um patched together. So Nelson, you know, huge hero for the Victorians, very, very interested in the story. Lots of versions of the story are circulating um throughout the century, really. And it seems to me, and from the work of the Dickens decoders, to look at potential sources, we didn't find anything that was a word-for-word, i.e., looking like it was reading aloud. But we did see a lot of instances of correspondences, right, between accounts that would have been widely available and what is being said here. I think in particular, Robert Southey's life of Nelson, which we know Dickens really loved, he talks about this among some of his um formative reading experience. That account talks a lot about Nelson's choice of dress on the day and the identification of the sniper. So a lot of those details, those outlines have appeared in other accounts. And I suppose what I think this Nelson version is giving us is sometimes a kind of playful filling in of some of the details. So there's one bit that I really love where it's talking specifically about the full uniform with gold lace, silk stockings, and God knows what orders and decorations. You know, that colloquial playfulness. I think that's what we're getting. The narrative is established, but there are some kind of playful interventions here and a turn towards the dark humour at the end when we're talking about the admiral rum, which is um being offered and called the admiral, the idea that he's brought home in a casket and then people are selling, selling the spirit in which he has been uh.

SPEAKER_03 16:43

Yeah. But Claire, Claire, do you think that this is Dickens rehashing it in his own mind and then the the Southeast story and then and then dictating it?

SPEAKER_01 16:54

I mean, yeah, I would say that to me this looks like uh a Dickensy version of the familiar Nelson story.

SPEAKER_03 17:02

He's improvising with Arthur here.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

I think it could either have been prepared for the lesson in advance and then it's being read aloud, dictated, or it's being kind of partially improvised in that learning space. Um, but it it does seem to me. I mean, what do you think, Dominic? Do you think there's a bit of Dickensy flair here?

SPEAKER_02 17:23

I think there is. Okay, I think there is from what you just said, which was um where he just says, Oh, God knows what orders and decorations. You think most historians aren't gonna throw that in and say, you know, they will say he was dressed in his admiral's uniform from the Battle of the Nile, where he wore whatever

Analyzing Dickensian Style and Forensic Linguistics

SPEAKER_02 17:36

it was, you know. Um so it's that thing possibly Hugo, you were saying about how he maybe is reading aloud, but he just throws in other bits. And I suppose you probably would, wouldn't you, actually? Because that if you're trying to test the person learning, you might just throw in a few colloquial coughs and splutters, even that you would have in a parliamentary debate, perhaps. That I wonder if you could get used to actually taking down an orderly text quite happily, but what you're having to pick up is alive, living speech that's pouring out of people in the moment.

SPEAKER_03 18:08

Yeah, that's very true, Dominic. I mean, he would need practice in improvised speech. Uh the God knows what is a very good example of that. So, yes, I think he would. The advantage of having a text is of course you can go back with your shorthand and look at it, you've got exactly what you're supposed to be writing. Whereas with improvisation, you know, like Henry found, you've got nothing to fall back on because you you can't remember what was said. So, how how do you know if your shorthand is correct or not when you haven't got a real text there? So there's advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the text is you've got some feedback at the end. The advantage of improvisation is you're getting practice in what you're going to be doing in the real world. So it could be easily be a bit of both. I think you're right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

And I think we see too, if we look at something like the Two Brothers, which has got this interesting frame story at the start. I once heard a story when I was living in Scotland from the mouth of a deceased judge which struck my imagination very forcibly. What's being worked in there is actually some of the vocab across the frame as a whole, which is quite handy for a court reporter. Look at some of the wording here. There's wards and there's wills and there's a judge and so on. So all of this is quite handy in shorthand. But at the same time there is this bit of creative flair, a deceased judge, these gothic elements, the dying light of a wood fire. He's taking some of the components which are really useful and indeed sort of fundamental for shorthand for this purpose, but he's putting a bit of a playful twist on them, I think.

SPEAKER_03 19:44

And Dickens likes the expression like struck very forcibly. You know, that that comes, it's quite an an unusual string of words there, and but it does come up in Dickens's work, this struck very forcibly. So you know, it has got that when you when you look at the language, even it's quite Dickensy, but maybe not completely, you know. So it's it's it's a very interesting little text, that one. There's another very interesting one called Didactic, which is a critique of Catholicism. Some quite heavy comments in at the end, but again, is this Dickens improvising? Is it just out from a text? What you know, what's going on here? I've I've got no idea. It is great to know what people think is going on in these texts. So please let us know also what you think. Just write to us, tell us, look, I read this thing and I think this, that, and you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

Yeah, I think we're so interested, aren't we, Hugo, in people's hypotheses and whether we can make any further progress in these mysteries. But one of the things we've also tried to do in this exhibition is just piece together various other theories. So, you know, people, uh the Dickens decoders, have come up with ideas for potential source text, and we try to trace those out and put a record all in one place, really, because this is on our website. You can follow the blogs, dig into some of the details. But we've tried to um sort of summarize, draw together and credit everyone who is being involved either in transcribing or in coming up with their own hypotheses and source text so far. And you can find that all here nicely kind of summarized on individual pages for each of the exercises in Arthur Stone's book.

SPEAKER_03 21:28

This is the first time that all Dickens' shorthand has kind of been collected in one place because it's dispersed in libraries all over the world. So bringing it all here together is actually quite useful because people can see it all together and really get into it.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

I was just wondering, you know, the breakthroughs you've made in only since 2021 when you threw it out out to the public on Christmas Eve, I think. Of course it was Christmas Eve, it must have been. Even if it wasn't, you have to say it was. Was it Christmas Eve that you threw it out for the deadline was New Year's Eve.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

So yeah, it had a certain flair to it, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Just nearly two years ago. And another little moment that I really like is the John Cayford, who I don't know anything about, but apparently is an original inspiration for Joe Gardery in the way he talks about mid sentence, the middle of a conversation, Dickens pulls out a notebook and starts writing, which is extraordinary in terms of. Immediacy that he's just ready to just immediately make a note, like we would on a phone today or something.

SPEAKER_03 22:22

Yes, that's right. It kind of shows that shorthand is a very, very useful thing for a journalist to have or a reporter to have. These days, they've got their smartphones, and you you just but if you just put on a s put a smartphone and record someone, you're not really doing anything. You're just you're just sort of dreaming away, then you then you go home and listen to the recording. But with shorthand, you can take it down word for word, which he did in parliament. But you could also, if you're just a journalist, you can just scribble some notes in shorthand and you pay attention to what the person is saying and you make notes about it. So it does, shorthand kind of keeps you more awake. And it's why journalists these days still, many still have to learn shorthand because they find it very useful.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

Sometimes in the middle of a conversation, he'd out with a piece of paper or a notebook and commence making the most extraordinary marks. Mr. Dickens used to tell me it was the devil's handwriting.

SPEAKER_03 23:21

That's a very good example of Dickens scribbling down something that he sees very, you know, off the cuff, improvised, taking the note very quickly. And this kind of thing is very interesting. And he also does another similar thing with the pocket diary. And in the middle is this piece of shorthand that Dickens scribbled down. A section from a story called The Holly Tree that he'd written ten years earlier. He's written a couple of lines from that on his pocket diary. Why on earth is he doing that? Why is he writing a piece from the Holly Tree ten years later in his pocket diary? And the answer is because he wants to put it in a speech that he's about to give, and it's just occurred to him at that moment. I think, oh, this would be a good thing for me to put in my speech, and he scribbles it down as a memo to himself. You know, that's a really interesting side of shorthand that it's like scribbling a note in longhand, but it's much quicker to do it in shorthand. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 24:20

And there it is. So this is from the 1867 pocket diary, and he writes Christmas 1855.

SPEAKER_03 24:26

And the other thing that's really interesting about that little extract is that Dickens can remember almost word for word what he wrote 12 years previously. I don't think he'll have the holly tree in front of him because why would he? I mean, he's in his diary, he's just thought of it. Uh, and he's probably thinking, oh, that reminds me of what the holly tree thing. And there's about I did actually analyze this, and there are three or four little differences there, but nothing very substantial. So he's almost got it word for word in his head, what he had written 10 or 12 years previously, which is pretty amazing, I think.

SPEAKER_02 24:58

I seem to remember from our previous episode, and it might have been UK, you're saying about you came across the word appearance, describing a ghost, and you thought that it should be apparition, possibly. But then I've got an episode with uh our mutual friend um John Bowen um on the Signalman coming up. And in the Signalman, the ghost is referred to as an appearance, I think. And it says so much, doesn't it? In terms of possible you're seeing a ghost, but it's mingled with skepticism, possibly, when it's an appearance.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Really interesting, but also just that specific vocab use. There are some amazing tools online now which your listeners might be interested in. Um, things like it's called click Dickens, and you can put in a keyword search and you can find across Dickens's work, oh wow, you know, so here is where appearance um related to a ghostly sighting is coming up. And you can trace, okay, well, this is a sort of Dickensian usage versus a standard 19th century one. So tools like that have really helped this project, I think, albeit we're still trying to resolve these mysteries, aren't we, Hugo?

SPEAKER_03 26:04

We are indeed. And you know, we're just very interested in what other people think about this, especially in terms of their feel for Dickens and so on, and what makes them think that something is a Dickensy improvisation and what isn't, you know, because it's all very personal in a way.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

One of the interesting things um we've been doing over the past few months, working with a brilliant academic at University of Manchester, Andrea Nini, who was doing a forensic linguistics analysis of some of the transcribed shorthand and trying to work out is there a sort of fingerprint in a way where we could say, yeah, this is definitely Dickens. Now, there's a couple of complicating factors here. That question of whether it's being dictated or improvised distorts a traditional um forensic linguistics approach to written text. It's also quite interesting because Andre was using a method with huge computational power, comparing a vast data set of these things against other 19th-century writers. And then we got um Dickensians, we got some colleagues to talk about what they see as Dickensian features of style. And they were coming up with completely different things to the computer, things like this habit of digression or a certain way of um layering description or a particular flare facsimile. And the computer wasn't really looking at any of that, was it, Hugo, in this method? So we really have to be trying to bring all these different angles to bear and seeing where it can get us to.

SPEAKER_03 27:40

That's right, because computers can't do that. I mean, computers don't get irony. They can't, yeah, at least they can't yet understand irony. So there are big holes in the in the computer investigation side of things. And that's a very interesting avenue for the future, I think.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

But exactly what you say, that use of humour, irony, metaphor. At present, I don't think the technology is able to capture some of those more nuanced details which make the story so rewarding.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Yeah, especially those moments where Dickens isn't being very Dickensian. I mean, just taking the beginning of Bleak House. The first sentence of that novel is just the word London. And then of course, but Dickens is so associated with enormous walls of words, long, long thoughts with all those semicolons of dashes and things. Possibly, yes, AI could be an interesting tool.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah, and we have been using this actually. So I've been working um with a team of informaticians, Professor Joe here at the University of Leicester, working towards a prototype neural network. So this is drawing on aspects of machine learning, um, but also uh taking it further in rather a complex way. But we should say the data set here compared to what um machine learning is typically trained upon, you know, thousands and thousands of pages of data, the data set for the Dickens code was really, really small. And so this has been a bit of a unique challenge, I think, for these types of technology, because there is so um little that we can input, a limited corpus, only part of which has been deciphered. And what I really saw through working with these colleagues is just how much effort goes in. You know, it seems to us like AI is a bit of an instant technology in some ways. You put that prompt into Chat GPT and something comes back almost immediately, doesn't it? But underpinning that is just a huge amount of human labour in building the data sets, preparing them appropriately. And I I will say at the moment the work is still ongoing here, but the computer has really struggled with I think the nature of the shorthand, which human decoders, once they get their eye in, are really good at understanding when a dot belongs to this other symbol, you know, in being able to look at where the lineation is, looking at what maybe belongs with what, and also holding in their minds um flexibility around the possibilities. So we can hold in our working memory, or it might be this or that or this. Whereas the computer is really struggling to make, I think, some of the intuitive connections that the human decoders have been able to make. So far, it's been people power that's really made the breakthroughs in this project.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

So decoding Dickens is uh now up and running. Claire, just tell us again how can listeners find it and start working.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

So listeners just need to type into their browser dickenscode.omeka.net. That's Dickenscode all one word dot om e-k a dot net and then land on our exhibition landing page. It's free, it's online, um, there's loads of brilliant stuff to explore, some beautiful images supplied by the Dickens Museum and other archives, symbols, all kinds of stuff. So come along and check it out.

SPEAKER_02 31:13

Fantastic. Thanks very much, and uh see you both very soon. All the best.

SPEAKER_03 31:19

Thanks, Dominic.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Bye.

SPEAKER_02 31:20

Bye now.