gdowney

Information

First Name

Greg

Last name

Downey

Title

Professor and Director

CV

http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/PDF/cv.pdf

Awards and honors

2007 - William H. Kiekhofer Award (university teaching award)

Current course offerings

See my personal web site for current course offerings.

Courses taught

J201 - Introduction to mass communication
J676 - Special topics: Cyberspace and hypermedia
J697 - Media internship
J880 - Special topics: Human geography and mass communication

LIS 201 - The information society
LIS 569 - History of American librarianship
LIS 640 - Special topics: Digital divides and differences
LIS 810 - Special topics: Uncovering information labor

... and many others

Biography

Greg Downey is a Professor with a 50 percent appointment in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and a 50 percent appointment in the School of Library and Information Studies. He joined the UW faculty in 2001. Downey holds a B.S. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, an M.A. in liberal studies from Northwestern University, and a joint Ph.D. in history of technology and human geography from the Johns Hopkins University. Before coming to Madison, Downey spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography and the Humanities Institute at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Downey’s research focuses on information and communication technology and the human labor behind it. His first monograph, Telegraph Messenger Boys (Routledge, 2002), followed the story of a particular category of young information workers in the U.S. telegraph network from 1850 to 1950. His second monograph, Closed Captioning (Johns Hopkins, 2008) explored the way film subtitling, courtroom stenography, and deaf/hard-of-hearing education were intertwined into a technological system to link text to television, from the 1930s to the present.

At Madison Downey has taught classes on digital divides, geographic information systems, mass communication geography, and cyberspace/hypermedia. He is also one of the two professors currently teaching the undergraduate writing-intensive survey course "Introduction to Mass Communication" (J201). He has mentored undergraduate research on topics such as digital public radio and blogging the Iraq War, and graduate research on community information networks. Downey was the recipient of the 2007 William H. Kiekhofer Distinguished Teaching Award, the oldest award for teaching on campus.

In summer 2009 Professor Downey will begin an elected three-year term as the Director of the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Downey is an active member of the Society for the History of Technology. His published work has appeared in Technology and Culture, Knowledge and Society, the Professional Geographer, the International Review of Social History, and the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

Downey’s industry experience includes three years at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago, and three years at Roger Schank’s Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. He has volunteered summers with both the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago and the Community Information Exchange in Washington D.C. He lives in Madison with his wife, his two children, and not enough bicycles.

Areas of research

History and geography of information/communication technology and labor

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

B.S. Computer Science, 1987
M.S. Computer Science, 1989 

Northwestern University
M.A. Liberal Studies, 1995

Johns Hopkins University
Ph.D. History of Technology and Human Geography, 2000

Website

http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/

Office

5016 Vilas

Telephone

(608) 695-4310

Office hours

By appointment

Email

gdowney@wisc.edu

Recent publications

Greg Downey, Closed captioning: Subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

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).

Greg Downey, “Engaging human geography with library/information studies,” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 41 (2006).

Greg Downey, "Constructing 'computer compatible' stenographers: The transition to realtime transcription in courtroom reporting," Technology and Culture 47:1 (2006), 1-26.

Greg Downey, "The place of labor in the history of information technology revolutions," in Aad Blok and Greg Downey, eds., Uncovering labor in information revolutions, 1750-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225-261.

Greg Downey, Telegraph messenger boys: Labor, technology, and geography, 1850-1950 (New York: Routledge, 2002).

History

Member for

2 years 24 weeks