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.

"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

"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 [...] 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. [...] An interesting insight into something most of us take for granted."
— SciTech Book News (June 2008)

"Downey's book provides a through explanation of how the technology developed, and after reading Closed Captioning, you will never again take the technology for granted and you will clearly understand its role as a communication medium."
— Susan Barnes, Technology & Culture (April 2009)

"Despite its omissions, this book contains a wealth of information
that will further the ongoing debate surrounding these issues and will be of interest to students of the media and communications technology."
— Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, Business History Review (Spring 2009)

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.

"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)

"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)

"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)

"[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)

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 2009).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.