The Process and Personality for Captioning 
[Articulating Betweenity]
Captioning CODA
The Process and Personality for Captioning
Aside from viewing captioning almost every day of my (adult) life now on media screens (online videos, TV programs, movies), I also use it daily in classrooms I teach in, meetings I participate in, major public or university events I attend. I also served for many years as a regular grant reviewer for U.S. Department of Education grants given towards the funding of closed captioning of TV networks and programs. In short, I’m very familiar with captioning. It is a literacy process, practice, and product I am intimate with; it definitely has “personality.” Still. I have played this clip of Karl relating the “personality” and patience, the care and skill that he puts into captioning—as he goes through it four times—over and over again. Indeed it tells me things I already knew about him—the patience, the (bordering on obsessive) care with getting it right, the very awareness that there is a process going on both around and through him. But it also tells me about a much larger literacy narrative—a history, process, and product—that has gone on in our culture in the last 20-30 years that we (including me) hardly know anything about. That literacy narrative is captioning. And perhaps it is time that those of us interested in the arts and skills of communication, rhetoric, reading composing—and especially those of us interested in digital media interfaces with those literate acts—began to critically (and creatively) attend to the process and personality of captioning as well?
