Greg Downey
Greg Downey, researcher into the History of Technology and Human Geography
Bio: http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney
Bio
I'm currently a professor the University of Wisconsin-Madison in two departments at once: Journalism & Mass Communication and Library & Information Studies. My training was rooted in two different areas, however: History of Technology and Human Geography. I study the "history and geography of information/communication technology and labor," which can be a mouthful. Examples work better. My first book was _Telegraph messenger boys: Labor, technology, and geography, 1850-1950_ (Routledge, 2002) and my second was _Closed captioning: Subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Each of these explored a different global information/communication infrastructure (telegraph, television) through the lens of a particular labor process and set of rather unusual laborers within that infrastructure (largely male teens carrying messages through city streets, largely female adults transforming spoken audio into textual screen images). In between I also co-edited, with Aad Blok of the International Institute for Social History, a volume entitled _Uncovering labour in information revolutions, 1750-2000_ (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 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. (IDC list, June 2009)