Greg Elmer
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Greg Elmer (n. 1967, Birmingham, U.K.)
Greg Elmer is Bell Globemedia Research Chair, Associate Professor of Radio TV Arts, and Director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.
Among his most notable and innovative academic contributions to date, is the development of the Blogometer —a highly sensitive instrument used in the detection of trends that arise within the blogosphere as a result of posts made by influential bloggers. Touted as being the next Memex, the Blogometer is a revolutionary tool which is radically altering the way in which researchers go about studying online trends. The device is so sensitive in fact, that it can detect and chart even the most subtle changes in online activity. Although Elmer will not comment on the specifics of how the device works, he maintains that the Blogometer incorporates some of the functionality of one of his earlier innovations--the highly acclaimed and extremely stable Webivore Toolkit. Rumour has it that Elmer is currently in negotiations with Microsoft to discuss the possibility of licensing the Blogometer as a companion product to be bundled on the extremely popular and reliable Windows Vista platform.
He was awarded a PhD in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000. He is author of Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy (MIT Press: 2004), in addition to two other edited books, and a number of articles and book chapters. Professor Elmer previously held faculty appointments in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh (1999–2000), Boston College (2000–2003), and Florida State University (2003–2004).
In the spring of 2007 Dr. Elmer was visiting faculty fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio, Royal Dutch Academy of Social Sciences, Amsterdam. He has also received fellowships from the SSRC (New York City) and the Quebec government's FCAR agency. In the summer 2006 he was awarded a three year research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
In the fall of 2006 Professor Elmer, along with a number of graduate students at the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto initiated the Code Politics Project, the first comprehensive study of the internet in Canadian politics. The lab's key researchers/graduate students include Zach Devereaux, Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Peter Ryan, and Brady Curlew. Research reports from the project have become weekly readings for journalists, members of Parliament, political staff, and other communications and government relations employees in Ontario and across Canada. Research from the project has also been highlighted on CBC, CPAC, Global, CTV Newsnet, CBC Radio Canada.
In October, 2007 Greg Elmer joined the Canadian political newspaper The Hill Times as a regular columnist.
[edit] External links
• Infoscape Research Lab: [1]
