Gertrude Robinson

Today, I met Gertrude Robinson, one of the founders of Canadian Communication Studies. A founding mother, really. She was also one of the first tenured women at McGill. Robinson got her PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois and wound up here, in the sociology department. She gave a talk over at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada on journalism and gender, based on a comparative study of data collected in 1974 and 1994. The comparison was pretty interesting just by virtue of that old-school social science approach: design a questionnaire, ask the same questions of lots of people, and tabulate the results. Over two decades, you can see a lot. I’ve never been that interested in consistency or discipline in conceiving my own work, but there’s no arguing that over time, it has its rewards. Carrie went too — she likes Carrie, which is not terribly surprising given their shared interests.

Afterwards, we went and got passport photos taken — AGAIN — to the right specification for the Quebec permanent residency form. Which I hope to send out tomorrow.

In “I watch stuff way off schedule because of my DVR” department, last week’s Alias was actually good. I still don’t trust it, though.