Daniel Greene

Tag: ASL

American Sign Language

  • My First Captioned Video on YouTube!



    YouTube Annotations
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

    When I signed on to YouTube this morning, I noticed a new feature called Annotations that allows you to add Speech Bubbles, Notes, and Spotlights to your videos. I realized right away that the first two of these types of annotations gave me a way to caption my videos. They don’t allow for “closed” captioning; everyone who views the video sees them by default. There is a mechanism people can use, though, to turn them off while viewing them by clicking on the Menu button at the bottom of the player.

    This morning, I captioned a video that I recorded on Mother’s Day. At the time of this writing, it seems that you can only see the captions if you view the video on YouTube. YouTube says that, once they get this feature out of beta, they will support embeds, meaning that the annotations will show up when videos are shared in blogs, on Facebook, and the like.

    Although it was time-consuming (it took me about 45 minutes to an hour to caption a one-minute-forty-five-second [1:45] video), the graphical user interface (GUI) was rather intuitive. From my first experience using YouTube’s Annotations, I am certainly willing to use them again. Hooray for an easier way to caption videos!

  • Where was ASL, Deaf Presence in Super Bowl XLII?

    I was hoping that my colleague A Dreamer (yes, that’s his name) would be televised as he interpreted the National Anthem into ASL at the beginning of the big game. Unfortunately, this year’s coverage of the signing of the Star Spangled Banner was even less satisfying than last year’s. Last year, we at least got to watch Marlee Matlin signing “bombs bursting in air” on the big screen. This year, I was only able to see — by watching very carefully — the interpreter signing “flag was still there” (all in one nicely inflected ASL sign, by the way) on the Jumbo Tron behind Jordin Sparks’ head.

    And what about that Deaf Pepsi ad that was supposed to air? I never saw it. Did you?

  • Published in Eyes of Desire 2, A Deaf GLBT Reader

    Published in Eyes of Desire 2, A Deaf GLBT Reader

    Raymond Luczak published a story of mine in his book Eyes Of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader, available at Amazon.com.. My story is called “My First Deaf Guy” and it’s about my first lover, who happened to be Deaf, and why we broke up. (It might not be why you think.) I created this blog post so people who read the book and look me up through my bio in the book have a space to leave comments on the story.

    I edited this post for concision on March 12, 2012.

  • Singing & Signing “Pure Imagination”

    Here I am singing and signing the song “Pure Imagination” from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (more…)

  • Dennis Cokely "Culturally Rich Realities" Workshop



    Cokely Workshop 7 of 15
    Originally uploaded by danielgreene.

    This was the first time I had photographed a presenter giving a workshop in sign language. Those who know American Sign Language (ASL) can guess what Dr. Dennis Cokely was talking about. Those who don’t know ASL– well, they can have even more fun guessing. I don’t want to give away the content of his workshop to those who know ASL; rather, I encourage them to take his workshop themselves! As for those who don’t know ASL, there would be so much lost in translation if I simply said, “Dr. Cokely is signing X,” that I would be guilty of oversimplifying his message. And his workshop “Interpreting Culturally Rich Realities” is all about not oversimplifying any interpretation! I thank Dr. Cokely for his permission to photograph him as he worked.

    While I don’t want to give too much of his workshop away, I do want to use these photos to help myself and others who took his workshop recall some of this repeated points. One of the things Dr. Cokely repeatedly discussed was having multiple lexical items in one’s “mental files” to choose from when confronted with signs or words that represented “culturally rich realities,” or words that are not easily conveyed from one culture/language to another in a 1:1 ratio.

    As a photographer of a speaker presenting in ASL, I used the textual analysis and predictive skills I’ve developed as an interpreter to study Dr. Cokely’s rhetorical devices so that I would be prepared with my camera to capture him at the very moment when he would repeat one of his themes. As an instructor, he was very deft at using repetition to drive home a point.

    You may view my set of photos of Dennis Cokely on Flickr.