Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture—Sean Zdenek print, ebook

Dr. Sean Zdenek is an associate professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. His work was well-written, full of immediately useful information, and blew my mind by showing how captioning contributes to an aesthetic experience. He quickly disabused me of the misconception that “transcribing just the speech” is adequate. He eloquently demonstrates why YouTube-style automatic captioning is not the real thing. He builds on the sparse work of caption studies, and sets out many possible future research. He’s a fan of genre TV, and he brings fannish enthusiasm to the task.

He hosts a supplementary site with videos of all the material discussed in the book. Just reading that site provides much of his message. It’s also an excellent example of audio description.

http://readingsounds.net/book-contents/

Read if … You’ve ever wondered about the work captioning does, or if you’re interested in doing fansubs.

Avoid if … What is this captioning you speak of

He pays particular attention to “non-speech information,” whether it’s a dog barking in the distance, the sound of a match scratching into light on a zipper, Brad Pitt’s exaggerated southern accent, or how accurately BB–8’s character is captured in the DVD of The Force Awakens:

Closed captioning is, at heart, an interpretative and creative practice. Closed captioners need to interpret the changing meanings of BB–8’s beeping sounds and convey them to readers. Note that captioning nonspeech sounds does not typically focus on what they sound like but what they mean. At a fundamental level, captioning is about the function and meaning of sounds in context, not their formal sonic properties.

The meaning of BB–8’s beeping is sometimes conveyed in the official script, but not always. In the official movie script, which sticks very closely to the movie, BEEPING is the primary way of describing BB–8’s communication (which makes sense given that “BB” sounds like “beeping”).

The main verb used to describe BB–8’s style of communication in the closed captions is CHIRPING. With one exception — (BIRDS CHIRPING) — this verb is reserved solely for BB–8 and contrasts nicely with R2-D2’s BEEPING sounds at the end of the movie. In the following clip, two “thugs” attempt to steal BB–8 before he is freed by Rey. In the course of about forty seconds, BB–8 chirps six times and exclaims twice.

[examples and clips on Zdenek’s blog]

On the Digital Rhetorical Collaborative, Zdenek experiments with “cripping”¹ captioning:

Outside of professional contexts, captioning is understood to be a simple but time-consuming act, extraneous to the creative process, of writing down what’s being said. It is equated with unreflective, mindless transcription, so easy a machine can do it. Can we open up closed captioning to greater complexity? Can we upend practices and assumptions that haven’t changed in thirty years? What would it mean to bake captioning into our video productions and pedagogies instead of treating it only as an add-on, afterthought, simple legal requirement, or technical problem? Can we narrate a different coming out story for captioning, one that is not leveraged solely on the claim that captioning deserves greater attention because nondisabled audiences have (finally) discovered its value?

http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2016/07/26/cripping-closed-captioning-experiments-with-type-icons-and-dynamic-effects/

Zdenek puts Final Effects where his mouth is, showing a clip from the current commercial edition and then a creatively reimagined version. He’s remixing captions–a fundamentally fannish activity!

• He uses different typefaces to signal identity change in “The 100” (2015).
• The first 1982 Blade Runner has a dense soundscape. He compresses many existing captions to simple icons to allow for more information in a short time.
• When four kids are rapidly interpreting a map in The Goonies (1985), he elegantly assigns a distinctive color to each speaker.

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  1. this word is used, like “queering,” to suggest ways that the experiences we bring to a topic can generate a new way of doing things ↩︎