Greg Downey @ UW-Madison

Faculty mentoring of student thesis work is an important component of both professional training and peer review. Serving on a thesis committee is also one of the best ways for faculty to learn about, and learn from, each other's research. Especially for "interdisciplinary" scholars, experience with a wide range of students and disciplines through thesis work helps build the dense social network required for innovative knowledge production.

Doctoral thesis committees

L. Chase, "Interactions between records managers and systems analysts" (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies, 2007).
C.-S. Lin, “Examining the conceptualization of government publications on the world wide web: A genre theory inspired conceptual framework” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies, 2007).
K. Coulter, "Visions of 'unity in diversity': Territorial appeals in contemporary German filmmaking” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison Department of Geography, 2006).
J. Heuman, "Configuring the viewer in transition: Communication policy and the television viewer between 'old' and 'new' media" (Ph.D thesis, UW-Madison Department of Communication Arts, 2006).
P. Lawton, “’Make new mistakes’: An analysis of ARL member digital libraries,” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies, 2006).
T. Newell, “A virtual environment for teaching information literacy,” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies, 2006).
L. Wright, “The rise and fall of community networking in the United States” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 2005).*
S. Tzu-Hsuan Chen, “Not just an imagined community: Mass media and the identity matrix of sports” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 2005).
S. Lim, “Power of systems offices in academic library organizations” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies, 2004).
Y. Kim, “Measuring and assessing Internet service quality at public libraries” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies, 2003).
B. Harrison, “Tourism and the reworking of rural Vermont, 1880s--1970s” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison Department of Geography, 2003).
M. Tremayne, “Learning from Web-based news: The role of interactivity and motivation” (Ph.D. thesis, UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 2002).

Masters thesis committees

L. Conlon, “Shifting models of Wisconsin Eye” (M.S. thesis, UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 2006).
M. McCalmont, “Place and practice in wireless networks” (M.S. thesis, UW-Madison Department of Geography, 2006).
J. Morgan, “Teaching and communicating with the Web: Testing the use of an online web site manager by K-12 teachers” (M.S. thesis, UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 2003).

Undergraduate honors thesis mentoring

Kelsey Vidaillet, "The Independent Library Movement in Cuba" (2006).*
Ozge Sevendik, "Weblogging in the Iraq War" (2006).*
John Pederson, "Digital radio and the public interest" (2005).*

* committee chair

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 8 and in third grade. He loves games, reading, swimming, and art and currently wants to be a scientist when he grows up. Suzanne is 5 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.

Latest posting on my independent weblog, Uncovering Information Labor (not hosted by UW-Madison)

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... (see my weblog for more postings)

Gregory J. Downey,
Closed captioning: Subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television (JHU 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

Aad Blok and Greg Downey, eds., Uncovering labour in information revolutions, 1750-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

International Review of Social History Supplements (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)

"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)

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

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 (Madison: 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) 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), 1-26.

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 Aad Blok and Greg Downey, eds., Uncovering labour in information revolutions, 1750-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225-261.

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), 209-235.

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 Shirley Gorenstein, ed., Research in Science and Technology Studies: Gender and Work, vol. 12 of Knowledge and Society (JAI Press, 2000), 129-152.

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 (November 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.

• Formatted @ min 800x600 screen • Updated May 6, 2008 by gdowney @ wisc.edu


	Today is		Greg is listening to his kids race each other on Mario Kart Wii.