Abstract: | Every day closed captioners must decide whether and how to describe background noises, accents, laughter, musical cues, and even silences. When captioners describe a sound - or choose to ignore it - they are applying their own subjective interpretations to otherwise objective noises, creating meaning that does not necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. Sean Zdenek looks at closed-captioning as a potent source of meaning in rhetorical analysis, demonstrating how the choices captioners make affect the way deaf and hard of hearing viewers experience media. He draws on hundreds of real-life examples, as well as interviews with both professional captioners and regular viewers of closed captioning, to provide an engrossing look at how we make the audible visible. |
