Winner, 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize given by the Society for Social
Studies of Science (4S). and Awarded "Best Information 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 andnatural 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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