Reading Sounds

Author: Sean Zdenek
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022631278X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn t necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies."

Reading Sounds

Author: Sean Zdenek
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022631281X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
Imagine a common movie scene: a hero confronts a villain. Captioning such a moment would at first glance seem as basic as transcribing the dialogue. But consider the choices involved: How do you convey the sarcasm in a comeback? Do you include a henchman’s muttering in the background? Does the villain emit a scream, a grunt, or a howl as he goes down? And how do you note a gunshot without spoiling the scene? These are the choices closed captioners face every day. Captioners must decide whether and how to describe background noises, accents, laughter, musical cues, and even silences. When captioners describe a sound—or choose to ignore it—they are applying their own subjective interpretations to otherwise objective noises, creating meaning that does not necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. Reading Sounds looks at closed-captioning as a potent source of meaning in rhetorical analysis. Through nine engrossing chapters, Sean Zdenek demonstrates how the choices captioners make affect the way deaf and hard of hearing viewers experience media. He draws on hundreds of real-life examples, as well as interviews with both professional captioners and regular viewers of closed captioning. Zdenek’s analysis is an engrossing look at how we make the audible visible, one that proves that better standards for closed captioning create a better entertainment experience for all viewers.

The Marvelous Clouds

Author: John Durham Peters
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625397X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Book Description
“An ambitious re-writing—a re-synthesis, even—of concepts of media and culture . . . It is nothing less than an attempt at a history of Being.” —Los Angeles Review of Books When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media. Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world. A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence—from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google—The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us.

Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.

The Chattering Mind

Author: Samuel McCormick
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022667780X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
From Plato’s contempt for “the madness of the multitude” to Kant’s lament for “the great unthinking mass,” the history of Western thought is riddled with disdain for ordinary collective life. But it was not until Kierkegaard developed the term chatter that this disdain began to focus on the ordinary communicative practices that sustain this form of human togetherness. The Chattering Mind explores the intellectual tradition inaugurated by Kierkegaard’s work, tracing the conceptual history of everyday talk from his formative account of chatter to Heidegger’s recuperative discussion of “idle talk” to Lacan’s culminating treatment of “empty speech”—and ultimately into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms now yields big data for tech-savvy entrepreneurs. In this sense, The Chattering Mind is less a history of ideas than a book in search of a usable past. It is a study of how the modern world became anxious about everyday talk, figured in terms of the intellectual elites who piqued this anxiety, and written with an eye toward recent dilemmas of digital communication and culture. By explaining how a quintessentially unproblematic form of human communication became a communication problem in itself, McCormick shows how its conceptual history is essential to our understanding of media and communication today.

The Sound of Things Falling

Author: Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101605383
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
* National Bestseller and winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award * Hailed by Edmund White as "a brilliant new novel" on the cover of the New York Times Book Review * Lauded by Jonathan Franzen, E. L. Doctorow and many others From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force – an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia. Juan Gabriel Vásquez has been hailed not only as one of South America’s greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vásquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia. In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare. Vásquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher.

Go-Go Live

Author: Natalie Hopkinson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822352117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Go-go is the conga drum–inflected black popular music that emerged in Washington, D.C., during the 1970s. The guitarist Chuck Brown, the "Godfather of Go-Go," created the music by mixing sounds borrowed from church and the blues with the funk and flavor that he picked up playing for a local Latino band. Born in the inner city, amid the charred ruins of the 1968 race riots, go-go generated a distinct culture and an economy of independent, almost exclusively black-owned businesses that sold tickets to shows and recordings of live go-gos. At the peak of its popularity, in the 1980s, go-go could be heard around the capital every night of the week, on college campuses and in crumbling historic theaters, hole-in-the-wall nightclubs, backyards, and city parks. Go-Go Live is a social history of black Washington told through its go-go music and culture. Encompassing dance moves, nightclubs, and fashion, as well as the voices of artists, fans, business owners, and politicians, Natalie Hopkinson's Washington-based narrative reflects the broader history of race in urban America in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. In the 1990s, the middle class that had left the city for the suburbs in the postwar years began to return. Gentrification drove up property values and pushed go-go into D.C.'s suburbs. The Chocolate City is in decline, but its heart, D.C.'s distinctive go-go musical culture, continues to beat. On any given night, there's live go-go in the D.C. metro area.

Club Cultures

Author: Sarah Thornton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745668801
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
This is an innovative contribution to the study of popular culture, focusing on the youth cultures that revolve around dance clubs and raves.

Bossa Nova

Author: Ruy Castro
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613745745
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 399

Book Description
Bossa nova is one of the most popular musical genres in the world. Songs such as “The Girl from Ipanema” (the fifth most frequently played song in the world), “The Waters of March,” and “Desafinado” are known around the world. Bossa Nova—a number-one bestseller when originally published in Brazil as Chega de Saudade—is a definitive history of this seductive music. Based on extensive interviews with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jo+o Gilberto, and all the major musicians and their friends, Bossa Nova explains how a handful of Rio de Janeiro teenagers changed the face of popular culture around the world. Now, in this outstanding translation, the full flavor of Ruy Castro’s wisecracking, chatty Portuguese comes through in a feast of detail. Along the way he introduces a cast of unforgettable characters who turned Gilberto’s singular vision into the sound of a generation.

A Reader's Manifesto

Author: B. R. Myers
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Including: A response to critics, and: Ten rules for "serious" writers, the author continues his fight on behalf of the American reader, arguing against pretension in so-called "literary" fiction, naming names and exposing the literary status quo.