Which Sounds are Significant? Towards a Rhetoric of Closed Captioning

Abstract

This article offers a way of thinking about closed captioning that goes beyond <em>quality</em> (narrowly defined in current style guides in terms of visual design) to consider captioning as a rhetorical and interpretative practice that warrants further <em>analysis</em> and <em>criticism</em> from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. A rhetorical perspective recasts quality in terms of how genre, audience, context, and purpose shape the captioning act. Drawing on a range of Hollywood movies and television shows, this article addresses a set of topics that are central to an understanding of the effectiveness, significance, and reception of captions: overcaptioning, undercaptioning, subtitles vs. captions, the manipulation of time, non-speech information, series awareness, and the backchannel.

A Social Justice Theory of Active Equality for Technical Communication

“…As researchers such as Dolmage (2014), Walters (2014), and Zdenek (2011, 2014, 2015), as well as contributors in Meloncon’s (2013) edited collection have made clear, able-ism is a critically under-examined form of marginalization within rhetoric and technical communication research and the organizational contexts in which technical communicators practice. Liberal forms of redistributive justice have enjoyed success in this area.…”

“…1). With respect to this emerging research area, Zdenek (2011) writes, “Despite the age of captioning technology, we still do not have a comprehensive approach to caption quality that goes beyond basic issues of typography, placement, and timing” (para. 2).…”

“…For example, creating the text for captioning can and should be a part of the initial invention stages of video production. Rather than solely caption dialogue, she also will follow Zdenek’s (2011) call to caption all significant sounds and will do her best to caption each audio element that may be crucial to the making of meaning for deaf and global users. Recognizing that Youtube’s automatic captioning feature actually works out of a presupposition of inequality regarding deaf users—a partition of the sensible that assumes viewers are hearing users—she will intervene and verify their equality.…”

“…Just as where the decision to include closed captioned dialogue and sound can function as a critical site of mediation among a range of differently abled bodies, transcribers have to make decisions that have great significance for how individuals with disabilities and other caption readers encounter race and other aspects of culture. Indeed, Zdenek (2011) demonstrates that the same audio content within a given television episode may be captioned differently on TV as closed captions on DVD with open digital subtitles (para. 11).…”

“…To illustrate the distinction between active and passive forms of politics, we consider the scenario of a technical communicator who works for a company that posts videos to YouTube, and who comes to see the complex practice of producing captions as an enactment of social justice. However, simply composing captions as a vital part of video production is not sufficient (Zdenek, 2011, 2015). For example, one readily finds ineffective and racist captions in television shows as popular as Breaking Bad (Gilligan, 2008) that highlight the “negative” discursive patterns of African American or Mexican American characters.…”