The Politics of Captions with Louise Hickman

The Good Robot

In this episode we chat to Louise Hickman, an activist and scholar based at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. Louise talks to us about stenography, the process of transcribing speech into shorthand. You may be familiar with this from having seen court reporters write a transcription of a tribunal or case, but many stenographers also do crucial access work to create live captions of someone speaking. Stenographers create their own online dictionaries and then access words really quickly using keyboard shortcuts. We explore the political decision making process of captioning and why this matters.