Memory Practices in the SciencesThe 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 Scienceshe 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. |
Contents
Geology and | 35 |
Cybernetics and the 1960s | 75 |
Biodiversity and the 2000s | 107 |
Copyright | |
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abstract archive argued argument become biodiversity biological botanical botanical nomenclature Bowker Bruno Latour central Charles Lyell cladistics classification systems climate clock cloning collection communities complex created culture cyberneticians cybernetics data set database discipline discourse earth ecological economy ecosystem entities epoch example fact fossil gene genetic geologist geology given global human ibid ical industrial infrastructure International jussive kind knowledge language Latour Lyell machines Mason & Dixon memory practices metadata metaphor Michel Serres Möbius strip modality nature nineteenth century nomenclature objects operate organization particular past PetBank philosophical physics plants political possible present principle problem produce reading recapitulation record regular remember representation resonance scientific scientists social society space spatial species standards storage story structures synchronization taxonomic taxonomists technoscience temporal theory things Thomas Pynchon tion traces uniformitarian universal Wiener Williams tube