fromCONCENTRATE

Series of photographs and videos made whilst walking between Newcastle train station and Culture Lab to document every occasion where I saw ‘evidence’ of ‘law’ (prep for our Theoretical Foundations ‘Media Theory’ seminar.)

At an extremely simplistic level, I wanted to formally begin explicitly investigating ‘law’ as a ‘medium’ within my Digital Media studies at Culture Lab.

Used my laptop to play back the images and videos in sequence as a slideshow presentation.  A kind of monotonous (and humourous) rhythm was established – pressing the spacebar and instinctively speaking words and phrases to accompany the photos – kind of spontaneous performance.

Uploaded the photos as an .MOV  file to YouTube and then added a ’subtitle track’ to reproduce/share the experience of the presentation.

Subtitling – Why would I do this?

Demonstrate a NEW, ABSOLUTE INTRINSIC reading of the signage and architecture of the city?  No.

But, street signage (for example) demonstrates very well, one of many levels of conceptual ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ taking place in people’s heads, unconsciously, all of the time.  And if we are in any doubt regarding how signage should be interpreted, we have a text – The Highway Code – to ensure that signage is interpreted (decoded) with consistency.  Interpretation is as important as the embedded message itself.

(Below – amusing comedy sketch on subtext…)

A fascinating aspect of Youtube (and the web2.0 phenomena as a whole) is the commenting function, which allows a kind of subjective subtitling to develop – people are enabled to share own perspective – interpretation democratised?

Subtext – add your thoughts to video

The subtitles in evidences_of_law.mov are a kind of subjective ‘sub-text‘ which, inevitably, intrudes and influences – imposing a kind of narrative on the viewer’s ‘reading’ of the images.

Whilst looking for a suitable YouTube subtitling tool I stumbled across Overstream – an application which is designed specifically so that individuals can impose their own reading over an online video.  Now, not only can we have foreign language subtitles (making a film accessible to broader audiences) and directors commentaries (sharing insight into a creative process) but also subjective commentaries and alternative readings – all within ‘mainstream media.’

I was emboldened to attempt to develop my own subtitle file following a presentation given by Pete Hindle at the Datarama event in October.  You can read all about that here.

Adding subtitles was a surprisingly technical affair – I found out that it is possible to embed a subtitle or caption track into a YouTube video by making an *.srt file.  This is basically a piece of code which is read in three components:

(1) number in the sequence
(2) timecode in/out
(3) text to be displayed

The file can be downloaded here:evidence_trial5.srt

Typing this ‘code’ by hand (even with copy and paste) was 

laborious
, tedious and 
frustrating
.  It took forever.  If I did something wrong then the *srt. file wouldn’t load to YouTube.  And if I needed to add something in then the number of all the subsequent entries had to be changed.  It was painful going back and forth lining up the times with the appropriate frames.

Through this exercise it is much clearer to me why we might use tools (software, interfaces…) to automate this kind of laborious coding task.  I would have given up if I had not been really determined to share the file.

Only a minority of individuals with a certain level of technical knowledge would put this amount of effort into subtitling a YouTube video so, the absence of a higher level interfacing tool (subtitling software) creates a barrier to participation.

Below: notes from Jamie Allen Media Theory session (4-11-2009) on MRes. research WIKI.

http://www.fromconcentrate.net/WIKI/doku.php?id=04-11-2009

(Has everyone seen John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ (1988)?…)