Gilbert has a PhD in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2004). He specializes in the study of the production, composition, distribution, and the use of text in various media conditions, especially online and technical communication. He also studies, and teaches, rhetoric, which means persuasion, which means how to influence people to do things, or to believe things, with your words, and how we can use language to both inform and to connect. Both in his research and in the classroom Gilbert uses computer-assisted tools for text analysis, from concordancers to semantic-network visualizers to topic resolution tools.