Talk Description to Me

Facts and Accuracy   by JJ Hunt When describing an image for an art gallery, or a movie for a broadcaster, being 100% accurate is an important part of the job. If a character is reading a book and I call it a magazine - that’s a flub and it needs to be corrected. But can that standard be maintained when having intentionally descriptive conversations? In theory, sure. But it requires exhaustive research, a narrow and predetermined conversation, and no generalizations - only specifics. And boy, does that take the fun out of a good conversation! When re-listening to our first few episodes, I noticed a fairly obvious pattern; when our conversations veered into territory I hadn’t fully prepared for, or required descriptions of images or videos that I hadn’t seen for days or even weeks, my descriptions were more vague and included some minor inaccuracies. That’s inevitable, I suppose, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it. When Chris and I are recording I have notes and my laptop...

Black Hawk In our recent conversations about sports teams appropriating cultures, and adopting names and mascots based on racial stereotypes, we mused about the name Blackhawks, used by the Chicago's NHL team. There was much left to discuss, but it neither fit into the episode nor our description-rich mandate. But if you’re curious about the name, how it came to be, and why it might be less ignorant and hurtful than other appropriated names, here’s a great article from The Atlantic, originally published in June, 2015. After we recorded this episode, several sports teams made major announcements about their names and logos - most notably the Washington Redskins. There are lots of news reports circulating about this, including this brief primer with accompanying video on CNN.  For images of Aunt Jemima, check out this Pinterest collection titled Aunt Jemima Throughout History .  

Neutrality and Its Limits When we decided to describe the image of George Floyd being killed by a white police officer, one of our early concerns was neutrality and objectivity. Audio description relies on objectivity to build a verbal representation of what’s presented visually. This is its purpose. We, however, aren’t robots, at least not yet. We don’t shy away from the difficult subjects, and there are times when neutrality feels impossible, or just downright inappropriate. Our goal is to explore and describe, not to editorialize, and we’ll do our best to present information in such a way that lets you make your own judgements. But that’s easier to do (and makes more sense!) when describing a TV show or movie than it is when having a contextual conversation about real-life events. Should any of us be neutral when discussing George Floyd’s murder? We both understand that we speak from various positions of privilege. We’re not always going to get it right. Sometimes our language will...