Sleeping Beauty and the Beast (of pervasive transcription)

In a 2003 movie, Good Bye Lenin, the protagonist's mother, living in East Berlin in 1989, enters a coma just before the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany. When she wakes up, her son makes all possible efforts to conceal the changes, as the shock would jeopardize the mother's fragile health. To this end, he builds up an old East Germany world around her—up to the restoration of a lost East Germany pickles brand using jars recovered from garbage.

A transcription scientist that would have slept through the last fifteen years or so would probably be disconcerted to a similar extent when going back to the bench. This modern Sleeping Beauty would probably feel fuzzy discovering the complexity and diversity of the new transcription world (and, of course, its contradictions) pretty much as if jumping from an old East Germany grocery store to a modern supermarket. …