# University poster finds the picture caption was settled by post

> A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities follows the volunteer readers of a regional talking newspaper as they worked out, with their listeners, what to say about a photograph.

Who is in it, what they are doing, and whether they look pleased: the order in which a newspaper photograph came to be described aloud was arrived at by letter, according to a research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities.

_Describing the Picture Aloud: How the Volunteer Readers of One Talking Newspaper Learned to Tell a Photograph, 1978–1996_ is the work of Halvard Nnamani, Doctoral Candidate, with Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, and Ylva Onyekwere, Doctoral Candidate. It places the present interest in machines that describe images alongside a room of volunteers who were doing so, on cassette, for people they knew.

> I was read to a good deal when I was small and never once thought of it as a method. The School has been very patient while I caught up with that.
>
> --- Halvard Nnamani, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities

The poster brings 388 surviving weekly editions, a set of committee minute books, a file of 96 listeners' letters and a series of recorded conversations into a single account of a settled practice. Across 1,236 described photographs it follows what a reader named first, what a reader declined to say, and how long the telling ran, before and after the society issued its readers a single page of guidance.

The University counts the poster among the occasions on which one of its schools has been content to listen for some time before concluding anything. Dr Achterberg said the team had "been made welcome by a great many people who owed us nothing, and we hope the poster is the sort of thing they would have read out".

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.kq7efe.