New book by Professor Greg Downey explores the hidden history of television closed captioning

Gregory J. Downey,
Closed captioning: Subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television (JHU Press, 2008).

Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology
328 pp.
$52.00 hardcover
available now

In this engaging study, Gregory J. Downey traces the development of closed captioning — a field that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from a decades-long intersection of cinematic subtitling, courtroom stenography, and education for the deaf. He discusses how digital computers, coupled with human mental and physical skills, made live television captioning possible. Downey's survey reveals the hidden information workers who mediate live audiovisual action and the production of written records. His work examines the relations between communication technology and human geography and explores the place of labor in a technologically complex and spatially fragmented world.

"An impressive and ambitious account of the history of the technology, geography, labor, and politics of three speech-to-text systems — subtitling, closed captioning for television, and court reporting. It is an original, well written and researched, and an important book."
— Ron Kline, Cornell University