Memory Practices in the Sciences (Inside Technology) (Hardcover)

by Geoffrey C. Bowker (Author) "LECTURE FIRST. Chronometricals and Horologicals, (Being not so much the Portal, as part of the temporary Scaffold to the Portal of this new Philosophy)..." (more)
Key Phrases: cybernetic texts, biodiversity data, universal discipline, United States, New York, Principles of Geology (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"A brilliant and subtle analysis that uncovers and explains how conventions of naming, classifying, recording, and remembering create and preserve human knowledge. This book is required reading for all who do science or want to understand it—a real tour de force."
—John Leslie King, Dean and Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan

"With a sharp new perspective grounded firmly in a deep knowledge of both the natural and social sciences, Bowker reimagines the ancient topic of memory, showing us how our physical and social practices shape what we remember and thus what we know."
—Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds and Outsiders

Product Description
Winner, 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize given by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). and Awarded "Best Information Science Book 2006" by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past—in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases—shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science—the making of infrastructures—and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past.

At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 273 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; illustrated edition edition (February 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262025892
• ISBN-13: 978-0262025898
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,106,411 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars For archivists only, March 13, 2009

By	Trevor Burnham (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Memory Practices in the Sciences (Inside Technology) (Paperback)

I was hoping for a book that would give me more insight into how scientists work. Instead, this is a heavily footnoted beast filled with sentences such as "The observation that we are dealing both by necessity and by choice with data stores as fundamental to biodiversity science does not of course mean that theory drops out of the equation."

That's not to say that the book is consistently dull; it's sprinkled with enjoyable quotations and the occasional illuminating example. But overall, I can only recommend this book to those studying or working in the field of scientific repositories. To the rest of us, all of this discussion of data formats and naming standards are just too mundane.