Typing - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Typing is the process of inputting text into a device, such as a typewriter

Typewriter

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...

, cell phone, computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

, or a calculator

Calculator

An electronic calculator is a small, portable, usually inexpensive electronic device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic. Modern calculators are more portable than most computers, though most PDAs are comparable in size to handheld calculators.The first solid-state electronic...

, by pressing keys on a keyboard

Computer keyboard

In computing, a keyboard is a typewriter-style keyboard, which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys, to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches...

. It can be distinguished from other means of input

Input

Input is the term denoting either an entrance or changes which are inserted into a system and which activate/modify a process. It is an abstract concept, used in the modeling, system design and system exploitation...

, such as the use of pointing device

Pointing device

A pointing device is an input interface that allows a user to input spatial data to a computer...

s like the computer mouse, and text input via speech recognition

Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...

.

The world's first typist was Lillian Sholes from Wisconsin. She was the daughter of Christopher Sholes

Christopher Sholes

Christopher Latham Sholes was an American inventor who invented the first practical typewriter and the QWERTY keyboard still in use today...

, the man who invented the first practical typewriter.

User interface

User interface

The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...

features such as spell checker

Spell checker

In computing, a spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary,...

, autocomplete

Autocomplete

Autocomplete is a feature provided by many web browsers, e-mail programs, search engine interfaces, source code editors, database query tools, word processors, and command line interpreters. Autocomplete involves the program predicting a word or phrase that the user wants to type in without the...

, and autoreplace

Autoreplace

Autoreplace or AutoCorrect is a feature in some text editors, word processors and other programs that accept user input via keyboard. It involves automatic replacement of a particular string with another one, usually one that is longer and harder to type, as "myname" with "Lee John Nikolai Francois...

serve to facilitate and speed up typing and to prevent or correct errors the typist may make.

Touch typing

The basic technique stands in contrast to hunt and peck typing as the typist keeps their eyes on the source copy at all times. Touch typing also involves the use of the home row method, where typists keep their wrists up, rather than resting them on a desk or keyboard

Computer keyboard

In computing, a keyboard is a typewriter-style keyboard, which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys, to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches...

as this can cause carpal tunnel syndrome

Carpal tunnel syndrome

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is an entrapment idiopathic median neuropathy, causing paresthesia, pain, and other symptoms in the distribution of the median nerve due to its compression at the wrist in the carpal tunnel. The pathophysiology is not completely understood but can be considered compression...

. To avoid this, typists using this method should sit up tall leaning slightly forward from the waist, place their feet flat on the floor in front of them with one foot slightly in front of the other, keeping their elbows close to their sides with forearms slanted slightly upward to the keyboard, fingers should be curved slightly resting on the home row (asdfjkl;).

Many touch typists also use keyboard shortcut

Keyboard shortcut

In computing, a keyboard shortcut is a finite set of one or more keys that invoke a software or operating system operation when triggered by the user. A meaning of term "keyboard shortcut" can vary depending on software manufacturer...

s or hotkeys when typing on a computer. This allows them to edit their document without having to take their hands off the keyboard to use a mouse. An example of a keyboard shortcut is touching the Control key plus the S key to save a copy as you type, or the Control key plus the Z key to undo a mistake. Many experienced typists can feel or sense when they've made an error and can hit the backspace key and make the correction without missing a beat.

While the four front fingers usually stay on the home keys, they have to stretch to reach other keys. The left pinky reaches the keys ` 1 q a z Caps Lock left Shift Tab left and Ctrl. They also reach Fn for laptop users. The left ring finger reaches 2 w s x left Alt. The left middle finger reaches 3 e d c. The left index finger reaches 4 r f v 5 t g b. The right index finger reaches 6 y h n 7 u j m. The right middle finger reaches 8 i k Comma. The right ring finger reaches 9 o l Period left Alt. The right pinky reaches 0 p ; / right Ctrl sub-menu button - [ ' right Shift = ] Enter Backspace \. Either one of the thumbs covers the spacebar.

Hunt and peck

Hunt and peck (two-fingered typing), also known as search and peck, is a common form of typing, in which the typist must find and press each key individually. This is usually slower than touch typing

Touch typing

Touch typing is typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys. Specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory. Touch typing typically involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard and having them...

. Instead of relying on the memorized position of keys, the typist must find each key by sight. Use of this method may also prevent the typist from being able to see what has been typed without glancing away from the keys. Although good accuracy may be achieved, any typing errors

Typographical error

A typographical error is a mistake made in, originally, the manual type-setting of printed material, or more recently, the typing process. The term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger, but usually excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors...

that are made may not be noticed immediately, if at all. There is also the disadvantage that because fewer fingers are used, they are forced to move a much greater distance.

There are many idiosyncratic typing styles in between "hunt and peck" and touch typing; for example, many people will type blindly, but use only two to five fingers, and not always in a systematic fashion. Some people have developed advanced forms of "peck minus hunt" that don't require looking at keys, or sacrifice of speed.

Buffering

Some people combine touch typing and hunt and peck by using a buffering method. In the buffer method, the typist looks at the source copy, mentally stores one or several sentences, then looks at the keyboard and types out the buffer of sentences. This eliminates frequent up and down motions with the head and is used in typing competitions in which the typist is not well versed in touch typing. It is not normally used in day-to-day contact with keyboards, only when time is of the essence.

Thumbing

A late 20th century trend in typing, primarily used with devices such as PDA

PDA

A PDA is most commonly a Personal digital assistant, also known as a Personal data assistant, a mobile electronic device.PDA may also refer to:In science, medicine and technology:...

s with thumb keyboard

Thumb Keyboard

A thumb keyboard, or a thumbboard, is a type of keyboard commonly found on PDAs, mobile phones, and PDA phones which has a familiar layout to an ordinary keyboard, such as QWERTY...

s or smartphone

Smartphone

A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...

s with small virtual keyboard

Virtual keyboard

A virtual keyboard is a software component that allows a user to enter characters. A virtual keyboard can usually be operated with multiple input devices, which may include a touchscreen, an actual keyboard and a computer mouse.- Types :...

s, is thumbing or thumb typing. This can be accomplished using one or both thumbs. Similar to desktop keyboards and input devices, if a user overuses keys which need hard presses and/or have small and unergonomic layouts, it could cause thumb tendonitis or other repetitive strain injury

Repetitive strain injury

Repetitive strain injury is an injury of the musculoskeletal and nervous systems that may be caused by...

Words per minute

Words per minute, commonly abbreviated wpm, is a measure of input or output speed.For the purposes of WPM measurement a word is standardized to five characters or keystrokes. For instance, "I run" counts as one word, but "rhinoceros" counts as two...

(WPM) is a measure of typing speed, commonly used in recruitment

Recruitment

Recruitment refers to the process of attracting, screening, and selecting qualified people for a job. For some components of the recruitment process, mid- and large-size organizations often retain professional recruiters or outsource some of the process to recruitment agencies.The recruitment...

. For the purposes of WPM measurement a word is standardized to five characters or keystrokes. Therefore, "fifth" counts as one word, but "fifteenth" counts as two.

The benefits of a standardized measurement of input speed are that it enables comparison across language and hardware boundaries. The speed of an Afrikaans

Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...

-speaking operator in Cape Town

Cape Town

Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...

can be compared with a French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

-speaking operator in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

Alphanumeric entry

In one study of average computer users, the average rate for transcription was 33 words per minute, and 19 words per minute for composition. In the same study, when the group was divided into "fast", "moderate" and "slow" groups, the average speeds were 40wpm, 35wpm, and 23wpm respectively. "Hunt and Peck" typists can reach speeds of about 37wpm for memorized text, and 27wpm when copying text.

An average professional typist reaches 50 to 70wpm, while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120. From the 1920s through the 1970s, typing speed (along with shorthand speed) was an important secretarial qualification and typing contests were popular and often publicized by typewriter companies as promotional tools.

, writer Barbara Blackburn was the fastest English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

typist in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard

Dvorak Simplified Keyboard

The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is a keyboard layout patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey. Over the years several slight variations were designed by the team led by Dvorak or by ANSI...

, she has maintained 150 words per minute (wpm) for 50 minutes, and 170 wpm for shorter periods. She has been clocked at a peak speed of 212 wpm. Blackburn, who failed her QWERTY typing class in high school, first encountered the Dvorak keyboard in 1938, quickly learned to achieve very high speeds, and occasionally toured giving speed-typing demonstrations during her secretarial career. She appeared on The David Letterman Show
The David Letterman Show
The David Letterman Show was a live morning NBC talk show hosted by David Letterman from June 23 to October 24, 1980. The show originally ran for 90 minutes, then 60 minutes from August 4 onward.-Background:...

and felt she was made a spectacle of. Blackburn died in April 2008.
However, recent emergence of several typing websites has made headway for several fast typists on normal computer keyboards to emerge along with new records, though unverifiable for the most part. Two of the most notable (and considered genuine) among these are the all-time records of speed set on typingzone.com, a famous offline typing website, by a Brazilian, Guilherme Sandrini Kukkains, who typed a 241.82 wpm on an english text in one of the monthly masters of the site, where 6 characters is equated to 1 word, which when calculated in terms of the general custom (5 characters = 1 word) yields 290.184 wpm and 256 wpm (a record caught on video) by American, Sean Wrona, renowned for winning the Ultimate Typing Championship

Ultimate Typing Championship

The Ultimate Typing Championship is a typing competition designed to identify and award the fastest typists around.-History:The Ultimate Typing Championship was created in order to promote typing and find the fastest typists in USA. Players compete against each other in typing races. Typing races...

, on a famous online typing competition site TypeRacer

TypeRacer

TypeRacer is a multiplayer online browser-based typing game.TypeRacer was launched in March 2008, and claims to be the first multiplayer typing game on the web. Site users compete by racing miniature cars that advance as the users type short passages of 20 to 100 words. Accuracy is required; any...

, in what is considered the highest ever legitimate score ever set on the site. . Both of these records are basically sprint speeds on short text selections lasting far lesser than 1 minute and were achieved on Qwerty keyboard.
Sean Wrona also maintained 174 wpm in a 50 minute test taken on hi-games.net, another online typing website to unofficially (Guinness no longer provides for a "fastest typist" section in their record books) displace Barbara BlackBurn as the fastest typist although disputes might still arise over the difference in the text difficult attempted by both as well as Wrona's use of the easier to type modern computer keyboards as opposed to the typewriter used by BlackBurn. .
Using a personalized interface

User interface

, physicist

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA is an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity...

, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , also referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a form of motor neuron disease caused by the degeneration of upper and lower neurons, located in the ventral horn of the spinal cord and the cortical neurons that provide their efferent input...

, managed to type 15 wpm with a switch and adapted software created by Walt Woltosz. Due to a slowdown of his motor skills, his interface was upgraded with an infrared camera

Thermographic camera

A thermographic camera or infrared camera is a device that forms an image using infrared radiation, similar to a common camera that forms an image using visible light...

that detects eye blinks. Current wpm are unknown.

Numeric entry

The numeric entry, or 10-key, speed is a measure of one's ability to manipulate a numeric keypad.

Error analysis

With the introduction of computers and word-processors, there has been a change in how text-entry is performed. In the past, using a typewriter, speed was measured with a stopwatch and errors were tallied by hand. With the current technology, document preparation is more about using word-processors as a composition aid, changing the meaning of error rate and how it is measured. Research performed by R. William Soukoreff and I. Scott MacKenzie, has led to a discovery of the application of a well-known algorithm. Through the use of this algorithm and accompanying analysis technique, two statistics were used, minimum string distance error rate (MSD error rate) and keystrokes per character (KSPC). The two advantages of this technique include:

1. Participants are allowed to enter text naturally, since they may commit error and correct them.

2. The identification of errors and generation of error rate statistics is easy to automate.

Deconstructing the text input process

Through analysis of keystrokes, the keystrokes of the input stream were divided into four classes: Correct (C), and Incorrect Fixed (IF), Fixes (F), Incorrect Not Fixed (INF). These key stroke classification are broken down into the following

1. The two classes Correct and Incorrect Not Fixed comprise all of the characters in transcribed text.

2. Fixes (F) keystrokes are easy to identify, and include keystrokes such as backspace, delete, cursor movements, and modifier keys.

3. Incorrect Fixed (IF) keystrokes are found in the input stream, but not the transcribed text, and are not editing keys.

Using these classes, the Minimum String Distance Error Rate and the Key Strokes per Character statistics can both be calculated.

Minimum string distance error rate

The minimum string distance (MSD) is the number of "primitives" which is the number of insertions, deletions, or substitutions to transform one string into another. The following equation was found for the MSD Error Rate

MSD Error Rate =

Key strokes per character (KSPC)

With the minimum string distance error, errors that are corrected do not appear in the transcribed text. The following example will show you why this is an important class of errors to consider:

Presented Text: the quick brown

Input Stream: the quix<-ck brown

Transcribed Text: the quick brown

in the above example, the incorrect character ('x') was deleted with a backspace ('<-'). Since these errors do not appear in the transcribed text, the MSD error rate is 0%. This is why there is the key strokes per character (KSPC) statistic.

KSPC =

The three shortcomings of the KSPC statistic are listed below:

1. High KSPC values can be related to either many errors which were corrected, or few errors which were not corrected, however there is no way to distinguish the two.

2. KSPC depend on the text input method, and cannot be used to meaningfully compare two different input methods, such as Qwerty-keyboard and a multi-tap input.

3. There is no obvious way to combine KSPC and MSD into an over-all error rate, even though they have an inverse relationship.

Example of MSD and KSPC

Presented Text: the quick brown

Input Stream: th quix<-ck brpown

Transcribed Text: th quick brpown

In the above example, there are three errors: an 'e' is omitted, there is an extra 'x' that is corrected, and there is an extra 'p' which was not corrected. The key strokes are mapped out below:

Input Stream: |th qui| |x| |<-| |ck br||p| |own|

C: |th qui|, |ck br|, |own| = 14 characters

F: |<-| = 1 character

IF: |x| =1 character

INF:|p| = 2 characters(since the 'e' is missing)

using these numbers the following statistics were calculated

MSD = (2 / 16)*100% = 12.5%

KSPC = (18 / 16) = 1.125

Further metrics

Using the classes described above, further metrics were defined by R. William Soukoreff and I.Scott MacKenzie:

1. Error correction efficiency refers to the ease with which the participant performed error correction.

Correction Efficiency = IF/F

2. Participant conscientiousness is the ratio of corrected errors to the total number of error, which helps distinguish perfectionists from apathetic participants.

Participant Conscientiousness = IF / (IF + INF)

3. If C represents the amount of useful information transferred, INF, IF, and F represent the proportion of bandwidth wasted.

Utilized Bandwidth = C / (C + INF + IF + F)

Wasted Bandwidth = (INF + IF + F)/ (C + INF + IF + F)

Total error rate

The classes described also provide an intuitive definition of total error rate:

Total Error Rate = ((INF + IF)/ (C + INF + IF)) * 100%

Not Corrected Error Rate = (INF/ (C + INF + IF)) * 100%

Corrected Error Rate = (IF/ (C + INF + IF)) * 100%

Since these three error rates are ratios, they are comparable between different devices, something that cannot be done with the KSPC statistic, which is device dependent.

External links

Open Directory typing: Many links for learning to type, testing your speed, etc.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Touch typing

Hunt and peck

Buffering

Thumbing

Words per minute

Alphanumeric entry

Numeric entry

Error analysis

Deconstructing the text input process

Minimum string distance error rate

Key strokes per character (KSPC)

Example of MSD and KSPC

Further metrics

Total error rate

See also

External links