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5112 Vilas /
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My research attempts to uncover and analyze information labor over time and space. My first book (published in 2002) used the case of telegraph messenger boys over a 100-year period of American history to consider how information internetworks are developed and deployed in concert with daily human labor. My second book (published in 2008) explored the hidden translation and transcription labor of television closed-captioners and courtroom stenographers and the movement of these practices from analog to digital technology over half a century of "communication justice" activism. I also co-edited (in 2004) an international anthology on the long history of information labor which demonstrates that this concept is crucial to any understanding of modernization, industrialization, and globalization. And I've recently written a 94-page introductory text on technology and communication in American history, sposored by the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology. Right now I'm working on the research for my third book, which will look at the "metadata labor" of library professionals in the decades between World War II and the World Wide Web. At the same time I'm co-editing a volume of historical essays on the intersection between print culture and science and technology studies, to be published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Finally, I'm also involved in a collaborative research project exploring the intellectual, cultural, and political-economic roots of the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery as an intentional model for a new way of constructing and conducting high-value interdisciplinary knowledge work in an environment of public engagement. (Scroll down to the right to see a listing of all my major research writings.)
My teaching explores information technology and human labor through the core curricula of my two main departments. I have frequently taught a 400-student Introduction to mass communication course for SJMC and a 200-student hybrid online and in-person course on The information society for SLIS. Both of these fulfill the university's Comm-B writing and speaking requirement while introducing students to new media technologies like podcasts, weblogs and wikis. I've also taught nearly a dozen different seminars on various topics here at UW-Madison, from The history of American librarianship and Video games and mass communication. to Unconvering information labor and Interdisciplinarity in the modern research university. In 2007 I won a university teaching award for my varied and innovative work in the classroom, and I have since been accepted as a fellow in the UW-Madison Teaching Academy. (Scroll down to the right to see a listing of all my courses.)
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My service contributes both to the daily governance of my university, and to the long-term welfare of my state. I have served on College of Letters and Science committees considering teaching, advising, and technology. I have mentored undergraduates through independent study, senior thesis, service-learning, and internship projects. I have taken time to travel the state and have spoken to small-town librarians, high-school journalism teachers and state legislators about media technology both new and old. And I attempt to maintain a forum in cyberspace where I can discuss my work in a less formal way with interested readers on my independent weblog Uncovering Information Labor. Most recently, I have been named the first Faculty Director of the new MIU-funded Internship in the Liberal Arts & Sciences project.
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The Director is "in". I am currently serving a faculty-elected three-year term (2009-2012) as the eleventh Director of the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication — a proud tradition that stretches back over a century — so plan now to come by the front office on the 5th floor of Vilas Hall in September and say "hi". (You'll know I'm around if my rather unmistakable bicycle is parked out in front of the building entrance.) And don't worry, I'll still be active in SLIS even while occupying the Director's office of SJMC.
Thanks for visiting my web site. "Forward!"
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MAILING ADDRESS OFFICE LOCATION |
MAILING ADDRESS OFFICE LOCATION |
Department
of Geography |
Department
of History of Science |
Holtz
Center for Science and Technology Studies |
Center
for the History of Print and Digital Culture |
Global Studies |
Visual Culture |
Map
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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 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.") 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 for MATEC,
a training program for healthcare workers on HIV/AIDS. Henry
is 12 and in seventh grade. He loves games, reading, swimming,
and art and currently wants to be a scientist when he grows up.
Suzanne is 9 and in fourth grade. 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, swimming at Devil's
Lake State Park, playing disc
golf at Elver Park, visiting the snapping turtle at Vilas
Zoo, and watching movies by Hayao
Miyazaki. And our two kittens, Rango and Cappuccino, are the actual rulers of the house.
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.
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Recent notes on
my door ...   (Click here to comment.) |
My Fall 2011 course will be The Information Society (LIS 201). This is a Comm-B course open to all majors (and ideal for those on the Digital Studies track). And in Spring 2012 I will not be teaching Introduction to Mass Communication (J 201) for the first time in many years. Instead, one of our newest faculty members, Chris Wells, will take over from me. As for me, I plan on preparing a new 100-level class on "Media Fluency in the Digital Age" — so stay tuned. Please note that I have made all of my student course evaluations for the last five years available to any UW student, faculty, or staff member (use your normal UW NetID and password as the login). |
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Cute bit on the NPR web site that a friend pointed me to: "The Jobs of Yesteryear" As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct. Click through the gallery below to see examples of endangered professions, from milkman to telegrapher, and hear from people who once filled those oft-forgotten jobs. Interestingly, half of the jobs profiled dealt with information labor: lector, copy boy, switchboard operator, typist in a typist pool, typesetter, and telegraph operator. (No telegraph messenger boys, sadly.) As a way of getting undergraduates to think about changes in labor and technology, I often find myself turning to the Prelinger Archives collection of corporate and educational training films. Here are two of my favorites, one for each of the two deparments I'm involved with at UW-Madison:  (Click here to comment.) |
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FALL |
The
information society
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Internship in the Liberal Arts & Sciences |
SPRING |
Internship in the Liberal Arts & Sciences |
Teaching
mass communication and information studies
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SUMMER |
Internship in the Liberal Arts & Sciences |
Mass
communication internship
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OTHER COURSES OF INTEREST |
Uncovering
information labor |
Video
games and mass communication |
Mapping
community information agencies |
Human
geography and mass communication |
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History
of American librarianship |
Introduction |
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Digital
divides and differences |
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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.
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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, Technology and Communication in American history (Washington, DC: Society for the History of Technology / American Historical Association, 2011). SHOT/AHA historical perspectives on technology, society, and culture This 94-page booklet explores the history of communication technology in the United States from the colonial period to the present, including print culture, wired networks, broadcast communication, and the digital convergence of communication in cyberspace. Each new round of communication technology is situated within four overlapping historical themes: national integration, industrial urbanization, mass consumption, and global economic restructuring. Drawing upon both well-known and more recent scholarly work--from the historiography of technology, communication studies, information studies, and human geography--Greg Downey pays close attention not only to the state and the market as sources of technological innovation, but also to the audience and the laborer as key actors in technological adoption. Fully illustrated and with a comprehensive bibliography, this booklet is suitable for both students and faculty seeking an accessible but analytical introduction to the history of American communication technology. |
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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 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." "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." "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." "Despite its omissions, this book contains a wealth
of information "This volume extensively details the socioeconomic patterns of the emerging technologies of textualized speech. Gender roles, for example, have pivoted around each of the professions discussed, and, because great use-value is created in these practices, the unusual circumstance of feminized labor that is also high-paid has been associated with these professions. This book also strikingly reveals how technology and even economy have produced opportunities for marginalized groups, like deaf/HOH and recent immigrants, to participate in mainstream activities like watching movies and television." "In illustrating the historical development of closed captioning in court systems as well as television, and by comparing these parallel speech-to- text domains, the author provides a level of insight that is impressive in its depth and breadth."
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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 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." "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." "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." "[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'”
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Gregory J. Downey, Telegraph messenger boys: Labor, technology, and geography, 1850-1950 (Routledge, 2002). 240 pp. 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. "This is interdisciplinary scholarship at its very best and
pioneers an approach to understanding communication networks that
has deep relevance to contemporary conditions." "[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." "[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." "[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." "[A] pioneering and insightful study—and
a model of interdisciplinary scholarship—that deserves a
wide readership." "[O]ffers intriguing analytical approaches
for labor historians and is a worthy contribution to communications
history." "[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." "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." "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." "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." "[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." "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."
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Updated December 2, 2011 by gdowney @ wisc.edu |
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Departments
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INTER-LS
400
Media Fluency for the Digital Age
J 901
J
697
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