Italics in Closed Captions
Closed captions of recent readings we published contained book titles and/or had other content that was italicized in print.
Having moved on our initial questions on captioning poetry, we use published print text as our guide when creating closed captions for texts read at public in-person or Zoom events. We have decided to indicate, for example, line and stanza breaks (using / and // respectively) that are visible in the print original but that are otherwise (more often than not) indiscernible as audio.
We also match capitalization, as it may be eclectic in a given text, and we match the print punctuation. In the effort documented here, we take up basic text formatting such as italicized text (And, if less common, bolded and underlined text.)
In order to display italics, for example, we learned to simply use basic html markup (e.g., <i>The Sound and the Fury</i>; then the closed captions must be saved as a .vtt file
Post by M.A. Keller
Research and proof of concept for The Junebugs [animation] in v21n2 proof pages by Peter Powers, forthcoming.
Markup/conversion of Camille Dungy reading (v20n2) by Peter Powers