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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 passage (despite apparent discontinuities),
as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics.
Both sciences, 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.
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Regis and Dianne
McKenna Professor and Executive Director of the Center for
Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University.
He is the author (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting
Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT
Press, 2000) and Science on the Run: Information Management
and Industrial Science at Schlumberger, 1920-1940 (MIT
Press, 1994).
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