Daniel Greene

Category: Communication

I got my BA in English with a concentration in Communications / Media Study. These posts represent my interest in those fields of study, including: Movies, Television, Websites, Blogging, HTML, CSS, Social Media, etc.

  • Participated in an ASL Hangout On Air, discussed how to have better signed language videoconferences

    Google Inc, 谷歌美国总部
    Google Inc, 谷歌美国总部 (Photo credit: Yang and Yun’s Album)

    Naomi Black at Google headquarters invited Willie King, Jared Evans, Ben Rubin, Richard Goodrow, me, (and maybe others who couldn’t make it) to a Hangout On Air so she should show JAC Cook how Google’s videoconferencing technology works. We talked about some of the plusses (no pun intended) and minuses of Google+ HOA’s (Hangouts On Air, not Homeowners’ Associations). On the plus side, you have an attractive service and you don’t have to deal with firewalls; on the minus side, it is hard to have group talks in ASL when only one signer is in a big pane and all the others are in “thumbnails” in the “filmstrip” along the bottom of the screen. We discussed ways of moderating multi-signer videoconferences, such as having people hold up their hands when they want to talk and waiting to be called upon. Naomi reminded us you can select the thumbnail of the person you want to watch in the big pane, and a few of us recommended doing away with the screen-and-filmstrip layout and going to a more equally-sized multi-pane layout (or one where you can control the size of panes). Jared Evans & Willie King work at ZVRS and they said they would like to give Google some tips on more effective multi-point videoconferencing for signed language users.

    The Brady Bunch opening grid, season one
    The Brady Bunch opening grid, season one (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    I am glad that Google keeps seeking the opinions of the signing communities; I just hope they are willing to change the layout of Hangouts to a “Brady Bunch” grid format– or at least offer it as an alternate layout.

    How about you? Does the current implementation of Google+ Hangouts work for you, or would you like to see changes made? Please leave your thoughts in comments below and/or send your feedback to Google! 🙂

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  • Crowdsourcing to closed-caption videos with Amara

    pictograms used by the United States National ...
    pictograms used by the United States National Park Service. A package containing all NPS symbols is available at the Open Icon Library (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Yesterday’s Hangout On Air on American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf culture is now a video on YouTube, and that video is being crowdsourced for subtitles at Amara. If you’ve never heard of Amara (I hadn’t until yesterday), it is a website dedicated to crowdsourcing the captioning of videos. How it works is that anyone can embed a video on Amara, and anyone can caption it on a volunteer basis. Captioning is very time-consuming. It involves both transcription, line division, and time coding. The average rate of speech is somewhere around 5 syllables per second (Kendall, 2009, p. 145). You have to listen to a few seconds of a video, pause the video, type what you just heard, and repeat the process. The transcription has to be time-coded; i.e., the words have to be matched with the time they appear on the video, usually at about 32 characters per line[1], so that’s time-consuming too. For these reasons, when it comes to help with closed-captioning, the more the merrier, especially because so many people make videos pro bono. This video is over 48 minutes, and of course it’s pro bono. If you would like to closed-caption a few lines of the video on Amara, please do. A little work by a lot of people will get the job done.

    Footnotes

    1. I don’t like to repeat statistics without sources, but 32 and 35 characters appeared often on webpages. Screen Subtitling’s white paper “Closed caption subtitling” [PDF] said “the number of characters per line or row is a set limitation” (Screen, 2008, p. 2) with no specification of the limit or reference to the authority. I searched the Internet for the “set limitation” on characters per line, and I found the same numbers repeated in different places with no traceable references. AutoCaption.com’s “Closed captioning defined” page said, “the features of traditional captioning are: … 32 characters per line” with no citation. Welstech wiki said the Department of Education required 35 characters per line, yet when I searched the US Department of Education website, I could find no such specification. CPC.com’s Closed Captioning FAQ answered the question, “What features are supported by CEA-608 closed captions for standard definition?” thus: ” […] A caption block can have up to 4 lines and up to 32 characters per line, although for accessibility reasons, it is recommended not to exceed 2 lines and 26 characters per line […].” I searched “CEA-608” to find the source, and I found the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) CEA-608-E Standard Details page. Unfortunately, the standards are published in a printed book that costs $300, $225 for members. Can anyone quote the source of authority? If so, please leave a comment.

    References

    Kendall, Tyler S. (2009). Speech rate, pause, and linguistic variation: An examination through the sociolinguistic archive and analysis project (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/kendall/kendall-dissertation-final.pdf.

    Screen.  (July 2008). Closed caption subtitling. Retrieved from  http://www.screen.subtitling.com/downloads/Closed%20Caption%20subtitling.pdf

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  • Got SoundCloud and posted my first sound

    The first sound I posted was an audiobook voiceover demo I did in 2002:

  • Two texts that inspire & inform my teaching & professional practice

    My response to a homework assignment to reflect on texts (of any kind – books, articles, poems, videos, TV, movies, photos, paintings) that inspire and inform our teaching and professional practice. The two I picked were Dead Poets Society for teaching and Grey’s Anatomy for professional practice.

  • Resources for teaching development of professional practice

    I made this video to fulfill an assignment in Teaching Ethics and Professional Practice at Western Oregon University’s MA in Interpreting Studies program with a concentration in Teaching Interpreting. The assignment was to share the process I went through to find materials to share in classes, in mentoring, or in my own work as an interpreter. Some of these resources were new to me; some of the resources I share in the video are recaps of what I have shared on this blog in the past few weeks. I am sorry I don’t have the time to transcribe and closed-caption the video for those who do not know ASL, but if you read my recent blog posts in addition to what is below, you already know what I was describing in the video. Here are the resources I describe:

    Videos

    United States Courts Federal Judiciary. (2010, September 23.) Nuremberg interpreter recalls historic trials [Video]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvY_1bMAZWY

    Activities

    Watching or participating in professional online discussion forum such as the #IntJC or #EPT Twitter chats (Interpreter Journal Club and Endless Possibilities Talks, respectively). I have participated in both in the past two weeks, and it has been beneficial both to me and them for spoken and signed language interpreters and translators to discuss their work with each other. For more info, see Interpreter joins the #IntJC Twitter form and Notes on “A Conversation with Translators.”

    Websites

    Greene, D. (n.d.) TerpTrans: An ASL-English interpreter/trainer on interpreting, transliterating, and translation. http://terptrans.com

    Shameless plug for my own blog. Many potential and practicing interpreters have found the pages and posts in this blog to be useful, and I am working hard at making it ever more professional and global. Feel free to review it! I’m open to feedback.

    Articles

    Klemenc-Ketis, Z. & Kersnik, J. (2011, August 23). Using movies to teach professionalism to medical students. BMC Medical Education 11(16). Retrieved from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/11/60