Karl Fredal: Where Does Meaning Come from
in Captioning? 
[Articulating Betweenity]
Captioning CODA
Karl Fredal: Where Does Meaning Come from
Despite, or perhaps even because of, Karl’s perception of captioning as an act of interpretive degradation (“something lost in the process”) he also can see the possibility in such interpretative change as “not necessarily mean[ing] that that’s a bad thing.” As captioned meaning unfolds relationally in the squared space of communication (thus, expanding the traditional rhetorical triangle) that is shared between (1) the interviewer/videographer and (2) the subject/interviewee along with (3) the audience and now (4) the captioner, Karl is asked to consider “where exactly does the meaning lie?” in captioned video. Here he grants the “original intent” to the person being interviewed and he recoups the “loss” mentioned earlier by pointing now to the ways in which any number of things might be added to the captioning process (“tone and vigor,” for example). In short, meaning gets made through captioning as well—a similar point that Sean Zdenek often makes in his own “Accessible Rhetoric” blogposts about captioning.
