REVIEWS
“This is a tremendously accessible book. Reading Sounds studies closed captioning in such a nuanced way that it should be required reading for anyone interested in the interface between technical communication or rhetoric and technology. Those who really care about how meaning is made through new media will want to read this book.”
— Jay Dolmage, author of Disability Rhetoric
"There's no book like this; plain and simple, it is one of the most original new books I’ve ever read. Zdenek’s work on the complexities, contradictions, and interpretive nuances of the art and technique of captioning video and sound addresses a critical and creative area with care and sensitivity. His writing style is sometimes clever but always clear and even elegant. What's more, the book is accessible to a wide range of audiences."
— Brenda Brueggemann, University of Louisville
"In Reading Sounds, Zdenek carves out entirely new rhetorical terrain focused on close examination of video captioning. After reading this book—even if you don’t regularly make use of closed captions--you’ll never experience captions the same way again. Zdenek ranges broadly, addressing the complex decisions made by captioners, the depth of cultural experience and resources necessary to produce quality captions, and the ways that readers read and respond to captions. Bridging rhetoric studies, sound studies, and multimedia studies, Zdenek’s lively, accessible book creates a new vocabulary for thinking about the effects that captions have on the way we experience multimedia."
— Stephanie Kerschbaum, University of Delaware
"Powerful. . . . Reading Sounds is clearly written and enjoyable. Commanding attention from sentence one, Zdenek builds a compelling argument not just that captions are interesting but also that captioners engage in significant rhetorical work."
— Gregory Zobel, Technical Communication
"Zdenek has not only broken new ground in the rhetorical analysis of closed captioning, he has also left no stone unturned in dissecting the different ways that captioners make rhetorical choices in describing sound—and more specifically, nonspeech sound—in textual form in television shows and movies. He has delivered a panoramic view of the rhetorical quality of closed captioning in popular media for scholars in technical communication, multimodal composition, disability studies, accessibility, and sound studies. Reading Sounds seems destined to be a foundational text that will be referenced by accessibility and caption scholars—starting with this reviewer—in the years to come."
— Janine Butler, Rhetoric Review
“An authoritative, readable guide to closed captioning. . . . Enhanced by an ancillary website commenting on dozens of thoughtfully selected film clips, Reading Sounds amply demonstrates the relevance of closed captioning.”
— Choice
2017 Winner
— Technical and Scientific Communication Award, CCCC
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
1. A Rhetorical View of Captioning - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0001
[digital rhetoric, multimodal composition, closed captioning history, disability awareness, rhetorical analysis, ableism]
This chapter introduces the book’s argument in terms of seven transformations of meaning that closed captioning enables: captions contextualize, clarify, formalize, equalize, linearize, time-shift, and distill. In the context of accessible media, these seven interlocking transformations provide a way of accounting for the differences between sound and writing, listening and reading. The chapter also offers a critique of ableism in scholarship on multimodal composition and digital rhetorics, a brief history of closed captioning, and an overview of rhetorical analysis as the book’s primary method of analysis. (pages 1 - 32)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Reading and Writing Captions - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0002
[style guides, non-speech information, science fiction, interviews, surveys]
This chapter sets out to provide an anatomy of a sound description by describing the common types of non-speech information (NSI) in closed captioning, accounting for the grammatical forms used in captioning, and distinguishing between discrete and sustained sounds. Four sci-fi action movies serve as a case study to explore the prevalence of each type of NSI: District 9, Inception, Man of Steel, and Oblivion. Next, an analysis of major captioning style guides suggests how style guides focus on micro-level issues of text presentation and avoid higher level issues that seem crucial to a full account of how captions make meaning: how readers interpret the text, how context and purpose shape the production and reception of captions, and the differences between reading and listening. Finally, this chapter reports on data collected from two studies with the writers and readers of captions: Interviews with professional closed captioners and surveys with regular viewers of closed-captioned programming. (pages 33 - 80)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Context and Subjectivity in Sound Effects Captioning - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0003
[sound effects, context, subjectivity, rhetorical invention, hypnotoad, futurama]
This chapter explores how sounds acquire meaning in specific audiovisual contexts. Even if we know, in raw technical terms, what a sound is – where it comes from, who or what made it, how to reproduce it precisely – we still won’t have enough information to caption it. To explore this claim, this chapter analyzes a single recurring sound – the Hypnotoad’s drone on Futurama – through the variety of captions attached to it over the course of nine years (2001-2010). The sheer variety of captions for a single non-speech sound points to a deeply subjective practice in which captioners rhetorically invent meaning that hasn’t quite existed before within the universe of the show. This same variety of captions also raises questions about the need for consistency in episodic television captioning. This chapter is rounded out with five additional examples from Family Guy, Twilight, Sunshine Cleaning, Hick, and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. (pages 81 - 106)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Logocentrism - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0004
[logocentrism, undercaptioning, overcaptioning, subtitling, speech transcription]
Despite a growing awareness of the importance of closed captioning among the general public, closed captioning is still routinely confused with speech-only subtitling. This chapter is organized around two approaches to closed captioning – undercaptioning and overcaptioning – that reflect major confusions over what it means to provide full access for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Whereas undercaptioning equates closed captioning with subtitling by leaving out or minimizing non-speech sounds/information, overcaptioning artificially and intrusively elevates speech sounds, even when such sounds only serve as background, ambient, or “keynote” noise. When indistinct speech sounds are captioned verbatim, captioners play god. Logocentrism is a new term for caption studies that asks us to reflect on the relationships between speech and non-speech sounds. Applied to caption studies, logocentrism refers to the act of privileging speech and the neglect of (or misunderstanding of the complex roles played by) non-speech. (pages 107 - 140)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Captioned Irony - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0005
[irony, timing, juxtaposition, punctuation, speaker identification]
Under the right conditions and with the right readers, closed captions can manipulate time, transporting readers into the future, or, in more general terms, providing them with advance or additional information. In this chapter, I coin the term captioned irony to account for this significant difference between captioned and uncaptioned texts. Just as dramatic irony accounts for situations in which the audience knows more than the characters, captioned irony accounts for situations in which caption viewers know more, sooner, or differently than non-caption viewers. This different experience is not dependent solely on poorly timed captions (although sometimes it is) but on the different affordances of reading and listening, and, in some case, the inflexible application of style guidelines to situations that require a more subtle approach. This chapter will explore the time-traveling potential of punctuation at the end of a line (when coupled with fast reading and/or slow speaking), speaker identifications (when they give away the identity of characters too soon), and ironic juxtapositions (when captions cross boundaries they shouldn’t). (pages 141 - 182)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Captioned Silences and Ambient Sounds - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0006
[silence, ambience, backchannel, keynote sounds, background music]
Silence isn’t included in our discussions or definitions of closed captioning but it sometimes needs to be closed captioned. Captioners not only inscribe sounds in writing but must also account for our assumptions about the nature, production, and reception of sounds. This chapter provides an ontology of captioned silences by discussing three types: The illusion of audible speech (mouthed words), the termination of sustained sounds, and the insertion of phantom words. The second half of this chapter discusses the challenges of captioning ambient sounds and music, which are too often reduced to discrete captions and lyrics only. This chapter aims to redraw two main boundaries around captioning. First, the boundary that defines captioning in terms of objectively verifiable sounds. Every definition of closed captioning tends towards positivism by treating captioning as an exercise in translating audio content. But not everything that needs to be captioned can be empirically verified outside of specific visual and narrative contexts. Second, the boundary that equates non-speech information (NSI) with speaker identification and screen placement. A broader view of NSI accounts for how sound functions rhetorically (in specific contexts and for specific purposes) and ideologically (according to the rules and assumptions of how sound works in film). (pages 183 - 218)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7. Cultural Literacy, Sonic Allusions, and Series Awareness - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0007
[cultural literacy, sonic allusions, accuracy, recontextualization, remix, inference, haziness, intertextuality, schemata, fragment]
Captioners need to be able to identify sounds from the past, not simply describe sounds phonetically. Songs, lyrics, and other television show themes may also need to be identified in the captions. Cultural literacy can also be applied at the global level of the individual television series: recurring sounds over multiple episodes can take on a special resonance. Captioners need to know which series sounds are significant and how they have been captioned in previous episodes. For the most part, cultural literacy has not been included in our public discussions of quality captioning or what captioners need to know. Accuracy and completeness – two key criteria for measuring quality – tend to be defined technically and simply: a misspelled word, a dropped caption, a poor transcription. Drawing on a range of examples, this chapter explores how captioning is more than an empty skill or decontextualized practice. Captioners need to draw on a deep well of knowledge – how much and what kinds of knowledge are always dependent on context – in order to identify significant sonic allusions, including allusions that have been remixed, (re)covered, and/or recontextualized. (pages 219 - 249)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8. In a Manner of Speaking - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0008
[entextualization, formalization, conventionalization, standard english, manner identification, language identification, foreign language subtitling, colloquialisms, onomatopoeia, language ideology]
Manner of speaking refers to the various nuances of speech and pronunciation. Typically, manner boils down to a speaker’s dialect or accent. But manner of speaking also includes any kind of linguistic variation that distinguishes one speaker from another: age, gender, regional differences, pitch, volume, hesitation, intonation, timbre, reverberation, speed, and so on. What happens to these qualities when they are “entextualized” in closed captions? What happens to meaning, and manner of speaking in particular, when they are entextualized in writing and recontextualized as closed captions? This chapter argues that closed captions tend to formalize speech by mimicking, for the sake of accessibility and uptake speed, conventional written English. For the most part, linguistic variations in pronunciation are scrubbed from the written caption file. What’s left of pronunciation or accent will typically be handled (if at all) by a non-speech identifier. If the speaker is drunk and slurring his words, the only clues in the captions will typically come from the manner of speaking identifier that introduces the drunk speech: (drunken slurring). The captioned speech itself, however, will be perfectly “sober,” so to speak – that is, entextualized as standard written English. (pages 250 - 289)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
9. The Future of Closed Captioning - Sean Zdenek
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.003.0009
[search, search engine optimization, findability, pedagogy, interactive transcripts, animated gifs, fourth wall, parody, internet memes]
This chapter looks to the future of closed captioning by discussing three areas in terms of universal design: video search, search engine optimization, and findability; pedagogy, interactive transcripts, and fully searchable lecture archives; and mainstream uses of captioning and subtitling that suggest a much wider role for captioning. In addition to interactive transcripts and search engine optimization, closed captioning enters the mainstream through a variety of channels: enhanced episodes, easter eggs, caption fails, animated GIFs, parody videos, creative or humorous captioning, fictional captions and Internet memes, occasional English subtitles, direct “fourth wall” references to the captions, and animated captions. (pages 290 - 302)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
