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Reading Sounds

Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture

By: Sean Zdenek

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Paperback | 23 December 2015 | Edition Number 1

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Paperback
368 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.27 x 1.52 x 0.22

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The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn't necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies.

Industry Reviews

"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"
"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"
"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

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