Memory Practices in the Sciences

<b>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.</b><p>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.</p><p>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. <i>In Memory Practices in the Sciences</i> 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.</p>