Downey, Gregory J. Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television.

• Author: Broad, David B.
• Position: Book review

Downey, Gregory J. Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 387 pages. Cloth, $52.00.

This work examines socio-technological change by focusing on four professions--film subtitling, deaf education, court reporting, and television captioning--through the lenses of the history of technology and human geography. At the latest juncture of these professions, the author describes a "digital convergence" that has shaped the social constructions of space and time for current generations. This volume is primarily historically linear, beginning in the silent-film era in which film subtitling has its origin. Next is a chapter on captioning of television shows intended for use by deaf and hard-of-hearing (HOH) people. This is followed by a chapter on the completely separate development of court stenography. The final three chapters document the convergence of the three systems through the emergence of overlapping technologies dating from the 1971 invention of closed captioning and continuing through the digital revolution.

The social context of technology in any historical period has some widely ignored aspects. Silent films, for example, were a boon to deaf and HOH people, in that they depended on action to tell stories. Whatever dialogue that was needed to follow the action was provided in "intertitles" that were inserted between scenes or segments of action. So deaf and HOH people were at no disadvantage when they watched films. The advent of "talkies," which ended the production of silent films in the late 1920s, represented a tragedy for the deaf and HOH population.

Stenographic court reporting has its roots in the need for an official transcript of legal proceedings for use in deliberations and appeals. Such transcripts were historically produced by a number of shorthand systems. The first stenotype machines were contemporary with the first typewriters in the 1870s, but machine stenography was not widely employed in courts or legal settings until the 1920s. Because every detail of speech, including punctuation, can have significant effects on the meaning of a legal record, the skills and neutrality of court reporters have been closely scrutinized. The court-reporting system built around stenographic machines was a cultural context that provided highly professional training and performance standards that were later tapped by the real-time...