Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television (review)

Deaf culture is parallel to the educational culture at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the school where I teach. RIT is the home of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), and many students move seamlessly between the two institutions. As a result, I generally work with interpreters and C-Print operators. As Gregory Downey points out, C-Print is a technology that was developed at NTID to caption educational classroom lectures in real time. Consistent with Downey’s description of gender issues in the development of closed captioning, most of the C-Print operators I work with are women.

Therefore, I was already acquainted with some of the developments discussed in Closed Captioning. What I did not know was that live captioning is done in the homes of many men and women from around the country. These “stenocaptionists” combine the latest in high-tech tools with old-fashioned stenographic techniques to bring the words to the screen.

Downey’s book is broken up into two sections: “Turning Speech into Text in Three Different Contexts” (cinema, television, and court reporting), and “Convergence in the Speech-to-Text Industry” (news, education, regulation, and court reporting). This is a social history rather than an engineering history, and the development of the decoder chip is not fully described. Rather, Downey addresses its role in the socio-history of the development of closed captioning: “The long struggle for the standardization, institutionalization, and regulation of closed captioning in the television-production process provides a clear historical example of the ways that state, corporate, and activist groups jockey for power in defining the social relations of translation” (p. 288). In other words, the technology of closed captioning was socially constructed. At various times, the need for closed captioning was framed as a system to provide emergency information, as a tool for English literacy, as a marketing vehicle to reach underserved consumers, and as a precondition for cultural citizenship. The history of closed captioning is a complex tale that involves many groups, industries, and organizations.

Downey details the intricacies from early cinema subtitles to current digitalization. Throughout this history, technology has always been married to people. We need people to correct the translation mistakes that machines make, in order to have accurate transcriptions for courtrooms, education, and entertainment.

The history of closed captioning revolves around job descriptions, gender issues, government grants, and organizations that provide the services. It is intertwined between the speech-to-text practices of film subtitling, television captioning, and court reporting. Labor issues and technology are both important for the development of closed-captioning technology. Although many technological solutions had been tried, it was the Television Decoder Circuitry Act (TDCA) signed by the first President Bush in 1990 that really made captioning available. The goal was to have most of the television sets in America caption-capable by 2000. While the TDCA did not mandate the sale of televisions with captioning chips, Zenith started delivering them with built-in decoders in October 1991, and other manufacturers followed.

Broadcast executives and court reporters have played a role in the history of closed captioning, but advocacy for its technological development has come from the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. Downey tells us that a key factor was the exclusion of these communities from the mass medium of television. He also considers the social interactions of the deaf community before and after closed captioning. Prior to closed captioning, deaf clubs would show films that had been captioned in group settings, and fan communities would discuss the plot and characters of a television program based on the action rather than the words. After the digitized process of closed captioning, these social activities were curtailed.

Gallaudet University, New York University’s Deafness Research and Training Center, and NTID all play important roles in this history. Downey’s book provides a through explanation of how the technology...