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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This project was conceived and completed while I was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in a split appointment between departments in the College of Letters and Sciences: the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the School of Library and Information Studies. Both departments went out of their way, during tough budget times and tight labor situations, to grant this junior scholar the time and resources necessary to finish his work. Research travel and summer salary costs were paid with the assistance of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School and the Irwin A. Maier Faculty Development Fund. Primary and secondary textual sources for this story were culled from libraries all over the nation thanks to the first-rate staff of the UW-Madison Memorial Library. Other materials were found at the Wisconsin Historical Society (Madison ), the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), the National Public Broadcasting Archives (College Park, MD), and the Gallaudet University Library (Washington, DC). My editor, Bob Brugger, and two anonymous reviewers at the Johns Hopkins University Press helped bring this project to fruition, and I thank them for their flexibility and professionalism. Many parts of this research were first presented to my colleagues at UW-Madison, and besides the faculty and students of my home departments , I would like to thank members of the Department of Geography , the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and the Department of History of Science for their insight and advice. Faculty and students at several other schools also gave me valuable feedback, especially at Cornell University, Drexel University, Indiana University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fellow historians Tom Haigh and Pablo Bozcowski organized productive conference sessions at the Society for the History of Technology (2004) and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (2003), allowing me to introduce my work to these groups. Some of this research was published as “Constructing ‘Computer Compatible’ Stenographers: The Transition to Realtime Transcription in Courtroom Reporting” in Technology and Culture (January 2006), and I appreciate the efforts of editor John Staudenmaier, assistant editor Suzanne Moon, managing editor Dave Lucsko, and the anonymous reviewers who helped me mold that manuscript. Finally, thanks to my colleague James Baughman for reading through the whole manuscript. Although they did not participate directly in the production of this book, I continue to owe an intellectual debt to David Harvey, Bill Leslie, and Erica Schoenberger, who mentored me through my doctoral study at the Johns Hopkins University in the late 1990s. I’m sure they will be delighted that I found a category of information laborers even more obscure than the telegraph messenger boys of my dissertation. Originally, this historical project on speech-to-text labor and technology was to have been paired with a present-day observation and interview project. But when I was first trained in the theories and methods of historical and geographical research, I was wisely counseled by my advisers to “follow the sources” rather than to stubbornly stick to any preconceived notions of how a particular project should unfold. The observations and arguments that follow thus rely much more on historical evidence and argument (what we can glean from primary and secondary textual material, set in the material contexts and cultural meanings of the times) than on ethnographic evidence and argument (what we can draw from observation and interview of present-day historical actors). However, I am indebted to some halfdozen members of the current captioning industry who spoke with me about their work practices, training programs, and employment strategies (I have left these informants anonymous in the text). Hopefully, the historical and geographical narrative presented here will inspire others to conduct further firsthand studies of the speech-to-text professions as they unfold. While this book was being written, my second child, Suzanne Rose Yendrek Downey, entered this world, and I would like to thank her, along with my first child, Henry, and my wife, Julie, for their patience during each long hour that Papa spent writing on the computer. (At least you got to watch some extra TV while I scrutinized the closed captioning of PBS Kids, right?) viii Acknowledgments Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my two grandmothers, Maebelle Downey and Melinda Krunfus, who—like many of the actors in the story that follows—balanced family life and work life through many years of twentieth-century technological change, always...