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My education included a B.S. and M.S. in computer
science from the University
of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (adviser: Roy
Campbell), an M.A. in liberal
studies from Northwestern
University (advisers: Josef
Barton and Henry
Binford) and a joint Ph.D. in history
of technology and human
geography from the Johns
Hopkins University (advisers: Bill
Leslie, Erica
Schoenberger, David
Harvey). Before coming to Madison, I spent a year
as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department
of Geography and the Humanities
Institute at the University
of Minnesota, Twin Cities. And yes, it might sound trite,
but the longer I live, the more I regret not taking better
advantage of the educational opportunities I was privileged
to have when I was young.
 My
industry experience began during my Illini days wtih civilian
work for defense contractor Sundstrand (subject to a record government
fine two years later after overbilling the Pentagon) and for
the Army Corps of Engineers. Upon graduation I worked for three
years at the Leo Burnett advertising
agency in Chicago, followed by three years at Roger
Schank’s Institute
for Learning Sciences at Northwestern
University, primarily working on the GuSS project. (Wired magazine wrote
of ILS in 1994, "most of the real work is done on the
backs of graduate students and other very smart, very young people
willing to channel atrocious amounts of energy into offbeat projects
for which they will get only modest credit, and even more modest
money [...] in the hallways, people in three-piece suits pass
people in leather flight helmets.") But the financial rewards
of these experiences increasingly came at the expense of my own
evolving philosophical and social goals.
 Local
participation in national and international NGOs like
the Sierra Club, Amnesty
International, and the ACLU,
as well as intermittent volunteer
work during this time, was one of the main things which motivated
me to move toward an academic career of research, teaching, and
service. I have done local volunteer work with the Chicago
Coalition for Information Access, the Enoch
Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, the Cromwell
Valley Community-Supported Agriculture project in Baltimore,
and the Living
Wage Campaign of Baltimore. I also worked as a summer intern
for two national organizations: the Center
for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago and the former Community
Information Exchange in Washington D.C. (whose database is now
folded into the Neighborhood Reinvestment
Corporation). And while completing my doctoral work
in Baltimore, I recylced
about two dozen old bicycles for local thrift shops.
 Creatively,
I have been the author of a comic strip called "Artsy
Fratsy" which ran daily in the Illinois student newspaper.
My good friend Julian and I self-published a coffeehouse 'zine
called One Penny Sheet in
Chicago during the early 1990s. I've had a bit of short fiction
published both online and
in print in my day, but not enough
to brag about. And yes, that was me you heard occasionally on
the JHU student radio station in the late 1990s, sitting
in with my good friend Gabe.
I strive to have my academic writing considered not dry and pedantic
but "creative" as well.
 I
currently reside in Madison,
WI with my wife Julie and our two kids Henry and Suzanne. Julie
works half-time for MATEC,
a training program for healthcare workers on HIV/AIDS. Henry
is 9 and in third grade. He loves games, reading, swimming, and
art and currently wants to be a scientist when he grows up. Suzanne
is 6 and in kindergarten. She loves sports, reading, drawing
and animals and currently wants to be a scientist when she grows
up too. We spend a lot of time going for walks in the nearby arboretum,
hanging out at our local
public library, and watching movies by Hayao
Miyazaki.
I feel lucky to live in a local community where intellectual
exploration, cultural diversity, artistic freedom, political
activism and social justice have such a long history, even if
today in my state and in my country they often seem to have an
uncertain future. |
 
I believe that financial disclosure
contributes to a healthy debate about the value of education
and research labor in society. Far from being supported
solely from either student tuition dollars or state taxpayer
dollars, I earn a combined private-, Federal-, State of
Wisconsin- and student tuition- funded salary of $72,400
per 9-month academic year (in 2006-2007 the average
9-month salary for all UW-Madison associate professors — excluding
those in the medical school —
was $78,112). I can sometimes earn additional money
(up to 2/9 of my salary) by teaching and/or researching over
the three summer months. Please note that over the last decade-and-a-half,
the State of Wisconsin has progressively reduced its support
for the university — most recently with a $90
million cut to the UW budget in 2005-06 on top of the $250
million cut in 2003-2005 — such that only
about 20% of the university's funding comes from state taxpayer
dollars. This reduction in support has accompanied both
increases in student tuition and long-term decreases in faculty
numbers (especially in smaller departments like mine), both
of which, I believe, diminish the accessibility and quality
of higher education.
UW FUNDING SOURCES 2004-05
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Gregory J. Downey, The
push-button library: Computers and the transformation of
metadata labor, 1945-1995.
Tentative title for my third
monograph, which I'm currently researching. I hope to have
a draft manuscript for publisher review by December 2008.
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Gregory J. Downey, Technology and communication
in American history (Society for the History of Technology
/ American Historical Association).
One of a series of SHOT/AHA
booklets on historical perspectives on technology, society,
and culture. Intended
for undergraduate and graduate students new to the historical
study of information and communication technology in society. Proposal
under contract; currently writing. Draft manuscript expected
August 2008.
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Rima Apple, Greg Downey, and
Steve Vaughn, eds.,The culture of print in science,
technology, engineering, and medicine (Univ. of Wisconsin Press).
Tentative title for an edited volume to be produced out of
the September 2008 Conference
on The Culture of Print in Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Medicine, organized by the UW-Madison
Center for the History
of Print Culture in Modern America. |
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Gregory
J. Downey, Closed captioning: Subtitling, stenography,
and the digital convergence of text with television (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology
328 pp.
$52.00 hardcover
available now
In this engaging study, Gregory J. Downey traces
the development of closed captioning — a field that emerged
in the 1970s and 1980s froms a decades-long intersection of cinematic
subtitling, courtroom stenography, and education for the deaf. He
discusses how digital computers, coupled with human mental
and physical skills, made live television captioning possible. Downey's
survey reveals the hidden information workers who mediate live audiovisual
action and the production of written records. His work examines
the relations between communication technology and human geography
and explores the place of labor in a technologically complex and
spatially fragmented world.
"Television closed captioning is not generated by
computers but by human beings, mainly women, who work out of their
homes, transmitting real-time text as it appears on the screen. Downey
(journalism and mass communication, University of Wisconsin, Madison)
traces the history of these unsung heroines and those in complementary
occupations of court reporting and foreign film subtitling. He reminds
the reader that it is not only the deaf who benefit from this work.
How often have we checked the headlines that scroll by on an airport
television as we dash to a plane? Embedded closed-captioning is used
as an index to the content of archived material. Chapters cover the
development of closed-captioning and the technology that allowed
it to happen. Downey also mentions the political activism that was
necessary to make text available to everyone. His admiration for
the professionals doing this work is evident on every page. An interesting
insight into something most of us take for granted."
— SciTech Book News (June 2008)
"An impressive and ambitious
account of the history of the technology, geography, labor, and
politics of three speech-to-text systems — subtitling, closed
captioning for television, and court reporting. It is an
original, well written and researched, and an important book."
— Ron Kline, Cornell University
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Aad
Blok and Greg Downey, eds., Uncovering
labour in information revolutions, 1750-2000 (Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
International Review of Social History, supplement no. 11
268 pp.
$29.99 softcover
available now
Most discussions of the present-day
Information Revolution are focused on the technological developments
in the realm of information and communication, and tend to overlook
both the human labour involved in the development, maintenance and
daily use of these information and communication technologies (ICTs),
and the consequences of the implementation of these ICTs for the
position and divisions of labour. This volume aims to redress this
imbalance by exploring the role, position and divisions of information
and communication labour in the broadest sense through
periods of revolutionary technological change. With contributions
on a variety of geographies in this latest as well as in earlier
information ages, this collection offers a comparative insight into
the continuities and discontinuities in information revolutions.
This special supplement to the International
Review of Social History contains 8 articles plus introduction
by Aad Blok and commentary by Greg Downey.
"[D]emonstrates
the importance of writing a labour history of communication and information
technology by making workers the units of analysis and using that
history 'as a lever for wider societal changes'”
— Vincent Mosco, Canadian
Journal of Communication (2008)
"It seems that Wiener's concern for 'the human use
of human beings' was one endorsed by the editors when assembling
the excellent chapters in this book, which is a rich source of additional
material to the literature."
— Michael J. Lynskey, Business
History (2006)
"There is no shortage of histories
of information ‘revolutions’. But, as the editors of
this supplement to the International Review of Social History explain,
much of this literature is internalist, focused on technology and
corporations, and tends towards technological boosterism. [...] The
editors argue that, in contrast, the impact of information technologies
on labour has been neglected."
— Martin Campbell-Kelly, Economic
History Review (2004)
"What is fascinating in these
accounts is the light they shed on how the identities which result
are shaped by the interplay between coercion and resistance, initiative
and intertia; how the employers’ ad hoc demands for particular
discrete skills and competencies are countered by workers’ aspirations
for coherently demarcated occupations which provide personal identity,
development and status; and how these in turn are shaped by specific
histories and geographies."
— Ursula Huws, International
Review of Social History (2004)
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Gregory
J. Downey, Telegraph messenger boys: Labor, technology, and
geography, 1850-1950 (Routledge, 2002).
240 pp.
$110.00 hardcover
$26.95 softcover
available now
Telegraph Messenger Boys provides an entirely
new perspective on the telegraph system, a communications network
that revolutionized
human perceptions of time and space. The book also tells a broader
story of human interaction with technology, and social and cultural
changes brought about by this relationship. Downey argues that
the telegraph network was not merely an electromechanical system
but a labor system as well. An army of uniformed boys worked
for the telegraph companies, linking ordinary human labor to
our first electronic information system. With a wealth of fascinating
observations about the role of youth, labor and cities in creating
the nation's first electronic grid, this study draws many useful
parallels between this first "internetwork" and the
one that is evolving now.
"Gregory J. Downey’s monograph sheds
light on the complexity of competing systems of work between
people and machines. He makes an important point on the symbiotic
rather than linear path of technological change."
— Harold L. Platt, Journal of Urban History (2007)
"Downey's decision to
enter the world of the telegraph by means of the boys who delivered
the telegrams allows him to explore a wide range of fascinating
questions about technology, labour, gender, age, organization,
and, of course, space and time."
— James Naylor, Histoire Sociale / Social
History (2004)
"Downey's focus on the bottom
rung of the employment ladder offers a unique perspective on the
telegraph's development and sheds light on the broader labor market,
particularly the market for child labor."
— Tomas Nonnenmacher, EH.Net (2004)
"By attending to the geographical
dimensions of human labor in constructing an earlier communication
system, Downey makes clear how understanding the telegraph can
help us to make better sense of other information systems, past
and present."
– Jennifer Light, International
Review of Social History (2004)
"[N]ot only a fascinating and
well-researched history, but also provides important insights into
contemporary debates about the relationship between human labor
and information technology."
— Christopher Wright, Enterprise & Society (2004)
"[O]ne of the most insightful
books in the history of technology that I have read in a long time.
Through a close examination of the intersections between labor,
space, time, and technology, Downey points the way to a new and
fruitful framework for making sense of our networked world."
— David Hochfelder, Technology & Culture (2003)
"[A] much-needed work that fills
a large gap in the literature on the world's first telecommunications
system and invites further scholarship on the subject."
—Thomas Jepsen, Isis (2003)
"[A] pioneering and insightful
study—and a model of interdisciplinary scholarship—that
deserves a wide readership."
— Howard P. Segal, American
Historical Review (2003)
"[O]ffers intriguing analytical
approaches for labor historians and is a worthy contribution to
communications history."
—William S. Pretzer, Journal
of American History (2003)
"[E]nlightens the readers by
demonstrating how technology is composed of social relations and
continual negotiations that worked to create its own space and
time through the aid of the young messenger boy."
—Carrie Sanders, Space
and Culture (2003)
"[O]pens a scholarly
window onto a little-explored world: not just that of the teenaged
information workers of an earlier era, but that of the human
side of any technological revolution. It suggests a rich vein
of investigation into our own information age."
—Paul Soukup, Communication Research Trends (2002)
"This is interdisciplinary
scholarship at its very best and pioneers an approach to understanding
communication networks that has deep relevance to contemporary
conditions."
— David Harvey, City University of New York
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Greg
Downey, “Teaching
reading with television: Constructing closed captioning using the
rhetoric of literacy,” in J.L. Rudolph and A.R. Nelson, eds., Education
and the culture of print in modern America (Univ.
of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming 2008).
The effort to save closed
captioning in the 1990s by mandating both the inclusion of “caption
decoders” in all new television sets, and the inclusion of
captioned information in all new television programs, came only
when closed-captioning was redefined as a tool for literacy education,
benefitting not only (and not primarily) deaf and hard-of-hearing
(D/HOH) persons, but hearing children and recent immigrants learning
English as a second language. This second wave of mainstream “captioning
for literacy” arguments
both drew upon and pushed aside earlier arguments for captioning
in D/HOH educational contexts.
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Greg Downey, “The
librarian and the Univac: Automation and labor at the 1962 Seattle
World’s Fair,” in C. McKercher and V. Mosco, eds., Knowledge
workers in the information society (Lexington Books,
2007).
The Univac on the Puget Sound gave 84 librarians
throughout a diverse geographical and functional division of labor — in
academic libraries, public libraries, school libraries, and corporate
libraries — their
first concrete example of information automation. How the designers
of LIBRARY-21 understood the labor of these librarians, and how
these librarians in turn came to understand their place within
LIBRARY-21, illustrates that the 'library of future' which evolved
over the next 40 years was less of an inevitable and 'scientific'
application of technology in the name of efficiency, and more a
complicated negotiation between systems designers, information
machines, and knowledge professionals.
"At last, we have a book that gives knowledge
workers back their agency. With analytical clarity and shrewd judgment,
McKercher and Mosco have drawn together an impressive range of
contributions from around the world that illustrate vividly, in
all their complexity, the hard choices that knowledge workers make
each day to balance their urge to creativity with their need to
scrape a living and defend working conditions. This is essential
reading for anyone who wants to understand knowledge work as it
is in the real world, as opposed to the fantasies of policy gurus."
—Ursula
Huws, Analytica Social and Economic Research
"This book focuses on the most neglected group
in the literature on our information-intensive economy: workers.
After authoring several articles on this topic themselves, McKercher
and Mosco are to be complimented for advancing this focus by bringing
together authors in Europe, North America, and Asia to address
the conditions of the diverse work force in the information economy:
workers in journalism, film, libraries, telecommunication, digital
equipment factories and call centers."
—Bella Mody, University
of Colorado
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 Greg
Downey, “Constructing
closed-captioning in the public interest: From minority media accessibility
to mainstream educational technology,” info 9:2/3
(2007).
Neither the corporate voluntarism promoted by the
FCC in the 1970s nor the “public-private partnership” of
the National Captioning Institute (NCI) in the 1980s proved able
to sustain a closed-captioning system; instead, a progressive round
of re-regulation on both the demand side (universal decoder distribution)
and the supply side (mandatory program captioning) was necessary
to bring the promise of broadcast equality to all deaf and hard-of-hearing
(D/HOH) citizens.
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 Greg
Downey, “Engaging human geography with library/information
studies,” Annual
Review of Information Science and Technology 41 (2006).
This essay considers the discipline of human geography
as a way of asking questions, a way of conceptualizing answers,
and a way of seeing both ICTs and ICAs relationally and dialectically — operating
in, on, and through material, social, and virtual landscapes — that
might be productive for scholars in LIS.
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 Greg
Downey, "Constructing 'computer compatible' stenographers:
The transition to realtime transcription in courtroom reporting," Technology
and Culture 47:1 (2006).
The public’s thirst
for courtroom drama has not changed much over the
decades, but the techniques and technologies used by courtroom
stenographers have been transformed from mechanical tools to digital
computers, from just-in-time print to realtime display, and from
information commodity to information service. And like so many
forms of information labor, both the sexual demographics and the
cultural gendering of courtroom stenography have changed, from
a masculine to a feminized job.
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 Greg
Downey, “Jumping contexts of space and time,” IEEE
Annals of the History of Computing (April-June
2004).
With such a geographic time/space sensibility,
it becomes possible to think about both computer systems and
computing activities
as 'jumping context' — moving from one place, one scale,
or one spatial/temporal arrangement to another — at key
historical moments. The question then becomes not 'how did computer
technology and capabilities change over time' or even 'how did
computing practices and needs change over time,' but 'how did
new contexts for computing practice open up, how did human actors
bring computing technology into those contexts, and how did not
only the computing technologies and computing practices, but
the contexts themsevles change as a result?
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 Greg
Downey, “Nodes,
links, and phase transitions: Popularizing ‘network science,’” Technology
and Culture 45:1 (2004).
Review essay discussing
three recent popular accounts of the birth of "network science" and
their implication for historians of science and technology: Albert-László Barabási, Linked:
The new science of networks (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing,
2002); Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small worlds and the groundbreaking
science of networks (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2002); and Duncan J. Watts, Six degrees: The science of a
connected age (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).
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 Greg
Downey, "The place of labour in the history of
information technology revolutions," in A. Blok and G.
Downey, eds., Uncovering
labour in information revolutions, 1750-2000 (Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
Today’s
digital-divide discussions – whether
focused on inequalities between households, schools, regions,
or nations – inevitably encompass normative claims (overt
or hidden) about the state of labor in the current and future
information age. Our historical narratives can help reveal some
of the contradictions found between the public investment in
the development of information infrastructures (from semiconductors
and programming languages to satellite communications and the
Internet) versus the private monopoly on profit from the services
and commodities that are subsequently developed using these infrastructures.
Thus might we both write a labor history – with laborers
themselves as units of analysis – and use that labor history
as a lever for wider societal changes.
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 Greg
Downey, “Telegraph
messenger boys: Crossing the borders between history of technology
and human geography,” The
Professional Geographer 55:2 (2003).
Historians of telegraphy have traditionally focused on
the system-builders who invented wire communications technologies
and incorporated them into profit-making enterprises. Geographers
of communications have traditionally traced the changes that
the telegraph network wrought on the rank-size of cities and
the speed of business. Both have ignored the history of the telegraph
messenger boys and the 'lived geography’ of the telegraph
network. This article summarizes a study of telegraph messengers
as both active components of technological systems and laboring
agents within produced urban spaces, bringing together the fields
of both history of technology and human geography.
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 Greg
Downey, "Virtual webs, physical technologies, hidden workers:
The spaces of labor in information internetworks," Technology
and Culture 42:2 (2001).
The Internet
exists in the windowless offices and basements and closets of suburban
start-ups just as the telegraph system existed
in the skyscraper
basement ready rooms where the messengers sat on their benches,
waiting
for the next buzz of the call box. What these workers
do, and where they do it, is fundamental to any history we might
write.
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 Greg
Downey, "'Running somewhere between men and women':
Gender and the construction of the telegraph messenger boy, " in
S. Gorenstein, ed., Research in Science and Technology
Studies: Gender
and Work (JAI Press,
2000).
Messenger boys were more than just handlers of telegrams.
They were themselves a technology of sorts, a special workforce
constructed by telegraph managers
with certain goals in mind: they had to be low-wage and controllable,
but diligent and trustworthy; instantly recognizable, but unobtrusively
invisible. Messengers were able to access places and activities
in the city that most urban women could not, but messengers were
unable to demand the rights, wages and respect of an urban man.
Thus the notion of gender was an important aspect of "messenger
technology."
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 Greg
Downey, "Information
networks and urban spaces: The case of the telegraph messenger
boy," Antenna 12:1 (1999).
In this short essay, I discuss
some of the particular challenges of "grounding" information
networks
in physical space, something that is often lost between the
engrossing study of what constitutes "information" itself and
the critical analysis of what value that information does or
does not provide our wider society. In particular, I argue
that to the degree that communications and transportation networks
are largely urban phenomena, we must pay careful attention
to the reciprocal relationships between such networks and urban
space.
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