Memory Practices in the Sciences

by Geoffrey C. Bowker

Overview

How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262524896
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/15/2008
Series:	Inside Technology
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
Synchronization and Synchrony in the Archive: Geology and the 1830s     35
The Empty Archive: Cybernetics and the 1960s     75
Databasing the World: Biodiversity and the 2000s     107
The Mnemonic Deep: The Importance of an Unruly Past     137
The Local Knowledge of a Globalizing Ethnos     201
Conclusion     223
References     231
Inside Technology     255
Index     257

What People are Saying About This

Endorsement

An elegantly crafted meditation on a series of historical horizons of memory machines. Social statistics, geological processes, cybernetics, databases, and biodiversity each became master models of and models for their times, recommencing and recommanding what is to be remembered, forgotten, or deemed irrelevant. And yet, Bowker concludes, all knowledge is nonetheless local, and utopian claims to universality, while constructing irreversible infrastructures, nonetheless cannot contain all that is needed for their own maintenance or our human mindful lives. Written with erudition and humor, this is a brilliant exploration of the aporia of our arkhe and archives.

—Michael M.J. Fischer, MIT, author of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

From the Publisher

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

John Leslie King

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.

Michael M.J. Fischer

An elegantly crafted meditation on a series of historical horizons of memory machines. Social statistics, geological processes, cybernetics, databases, and biodiversity each became master models of and models for their times, recommencing and recommanding what is to be remembered, forgotten, or deemed irrelevant. And yet, Bowker concludes, all knowledge is nonetheless local, and utopian claims to universality, while constructing irreversible infrastructures, nonetheless cannot contain all that is needed for their own maintenance or our human mindful lives. Written with erudition and humor, this is a brilliant exploration of the aporia of our arkhe and archives.

Editorial Reviews

Bowker offers a playful and richly textured look at the way we maintain records of the past and the multitude of purposes such memory practices can serve in the present. In so doing he reminds readers that the context in which we record the past shapes the stories we can tell.--Stephanie Young, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences--

Every reader will find much to ponder in this provocative exploration of the relationship of the present to the past.

--Jean Alexander, College and Research Libraries--

From the Publisher

Every reader will find much to ponder in this provocative exploration of the relationship of the present to the past.

—Jean Alexander, College and Research Libraries

Reviews

Every reader will find much to ponder in this provocative exploration of the relationship of the present to the past.

College and Research Libraries - Jean Alexander

Bowker offers a playful and richly textured look at the way we maintain records of the past and the multitude of purposes such memory practices can serve in the present. In so doing he reminds readers that the context in which we record the past shapes the stories we can tell.

Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences - Stephanie Young