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Memory Practices in the Sciences
Winner, 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize given by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). and Awarded "Best Information Science 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 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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionAcademic
312 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
6 people are currently reading
99 people want to read
About the author
Geoffrey C. Bowker
20 books10 followersGeoffrey C. Bowker is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He moved to UCI at the start of 2012, having held the positions of Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 7, 2009
I just finished reading Geoffrey Bowker's Memory Practices in the Sciences for the book club over at Reading Information Sciences. I gave myself a break and allowed myself to read it at a leisurely pace, a luxury I rarely have anymore.
At the heart of the book, is Bowker's examination of the ways in which "acts of committing to record" are socially imbued practices affecting our conception of the past in ways that. As a consequence, affect our present and future. Bowker begins with the effects of industrialization on memory practices in geology.
For me, what stands out is: The ways accounting practices used during the Industrial Revolution were transferred onto Geology (and geologic ways of deciphering the age of the earth) by Lyell and others. Lyell argued that the earth itself isn't "irregular," rather that it is just a bad archivist. What Lyell constructed was a spatio-temporal systemization that moved away from seeing the history of the earth as a series as catastrophic events. Methods of organizing work and the workplace were used to explain how the earth ages at regular intervals, rather than by events such as earthquakes and floods. He moved away from creationist theories of the earth's age. Bowker discusses how this (and other geologic theories of the time) privileged Western Europe and aided imperial interests and burgeoning globalization.
Bowker follows this approach to memory practices by looking at cybernetics, and its focus on semantic memory - "memory as pure pattern" (pg 76). Bowker sees cybernetics as working from universalism. Theories of cybernetics during the mid-twentieth century posited that cybernetics removes the need for memory as it worked to create a system that could hold all information equally, like a universal discipline. To work, cybernetics must be general. And through cybernetic systems, history becomes just a part of a classification scheme, a way of patterning. And as a result, Bowker argues, memory needs to be destroyed to create unity .
Bowker writes: "First, past disciplines are destroyed: they need to be created anew from first principles Second, an individual experimenter must destroy his or her knowledge of previous experiments. Third, one result of this double destruction will be the discovery by cybernetics that memory itself is epiphenomenal (pg 101).
As Bowker later notes, though, all data is always collected within a context. In cybernetic systems, context is eliminated, eliminating important information about how and why data has been collected. We lose the reason(s) behind collection methodologies which are almost always discipline specific.
Early in chapter 3, "Databasing the World: Biodiversity and the 2000s," Bowker writes "The miracle of memory in our time is that memory practices are materially rampant, invasive, implicated in the core of our being and of our understanding of the world - and yet we experience them and discourse about them in terms of their ideal ramifications on some hypostasized entity created to void materiality from the equation: the individual, the nation-state, the people, and so forth" (pg 109).
What Bowker broaches, in this chapter, is the way we as humans often take ourselves outside of nature when we create our ways of organizing and controlling nature. In addition, he examines the ways in which western peoples' have created systems that place other peoples (as a way of colonialization) classified as 'nature,' while placing their own practices as 'culture' and outside of these modes of classification.
As the chapter progresses, Bowker leads up to a discussion of how we can read databases both materially and discursively. Drawing from Derrida's discussions of how technologies can create new kinds of 'traces.' From these premises, Bowker argues that to 'read' databases, we need to look at what isn't categorized or classified. What is classified is considered important, politically, economically, ideologically, etc. By examining what is left out of these systems, we can start to form the context of systems. He notes that "If certain kinds of entities are being excluded from entering into the database we are creating, and if those entities share the feature that they are singular in space and time, then we are producing a set of models of the world that - despite its avowed historicity - is constraining us generally to converge on descriptions of the world in terms of repeatable entities: not because the world is so but because this is the nature of our manipulable data structures" (pg 146). What this means is that those entities that are named are studied, and once studied, are considered relevant subjects for future study. The unnamed become unimportant, and the systems created around those things we name are not created to support a place for the unnamed.
In biodiversity work, researchers from multiple disciplines using multiple discipline-specific methods and contexts deposit data into common databases. In addition, the data in the databases themselves need to be accessible when databases are updated technologically. As a result, the use of metadata becomes central. Metadata needs to be flexible enough to be accessible both today and in the future. And, it needs to be able to provide as much context as possible. Developing metadata standards that can encompass all possible futures while still serving our present (and the present and future for everyone) is still far off into the future.
At the heart of the book, is Bowker's examination of the ways in which "acts of committing to record" are socially imbued practices affecting our conception of the past in ways that. As a consequence, affect our present and future. Bowker begins with the effects of industrialization on memory practices in geology.
For me, what stands out is: The ways accounting practices used during the Industrial Revolution were transferred onto Geology (and geologic ways of deciphering the age of the earth) by Lyell and others. Lyell argued that the earth itself isn't "irregular," rather that it is just a bad archivist. What Lyell constructed was a spatio-temporal systemization that moved away from seeing the history of the earth as a series as catastrophic events. Methods of organizing work and the workplace were used to explain how the earth ages at regular intervals, rather than by events such as earthquakes and floods. He moved away from creationist theories of the earth's age. Bowker discusses how this (and other geologic theories of the time) privileged Western Europe and aided imperial interests and burgeoning globalization.
Bowker follows this approach to memory practices by looking at cybernetics, and its focus on semantic memory - "memory as pure pattern" (pg 76). Bowker sees cybernetics as working from universalism. Theories of cybernetics during the mid-twentieth century posited that cybernetics removes the need for memory as it worked to create a system that could hold all information equally, like a universal discipline. To work, cybernetics must be general. And through cybernetic systems, history becomes just a part of a classification scheme, a way of patterning. And as a result, Bowker argues, memory needs to be destroyed to create unity .
Bowker writes: "First, past disciplines are destroyed: they need to be created anew from first principles Second, an individual experimenter must destroy his or her knowledge of previous experiments. Third, one result of this double destruction will be the discovery by cybernetics that memory itself is epiphenomenal (pg 101).
As Bowker later notes, though, all data is always collected within a context. In cybernetic systems, context is eliminated, eliminating important information about how and why data has been collected. We lose the reason(s) behind collection methodologies which are almost always discipline specific.
Early in chapter 3, "Databasing the World: Biodiversity and the 2000s," Bowker writes "The miracle of memory in our time is that memory practices are materially rampant, invasive, implicated in the core of our being and of our understanding of the world - and yet we experience them and discourse about them in terms of their ideal ramifications on some hypostasized entity created to void materiality from the equation: the individual, the nation-state, the people, and so forth" (pg 109).
What Bowker broaches, in this chapter, is the way we as humans often take ourselves outside of nature when we create our ways of organizing and controlling nature. In addition, he examines the ways in which western peoples' have created systems that place other peoples (as a way of colonialization) classified as 'nature,' while placing their own practices as 'culture' and outside of these modes of classification.
As the chapter progresses, Bowker leads up to a discussion of how we can read databases both materially and discursively. Drawing from Derrida's discussions of how technologies can create new kinds of 'traces.' From these premises, Bowker argues that to 'read' databases, we need to look at what isn't categorized or classified. What is classified is considered important, politically, economically, ideologically, etc. By examining what is left out of these systems, we can start to form the context of systems. He notes that "If certain kinds of entities are being excluded from entering into the database we are creating, and if those entities share the feature that they are singular in space and time, then we are producing a set of models of the world that - despite its avowed historicity - is constraining us generally to converge on descriptions of the world in terms of repeatable entities: not because the world is so but because this is the nature of our manipulable data structures" (pg 146). What this means is that those entities that are named are studied, and once studied, are considered relevant subjects for future study. The unnamed become unimportant, and the systems created around those things we name are not created to support a place for the unnamed.
In biodiversity work, researchers from multiple disciplines using multiple discipline-specific methods and contexts deposit data into common databases. In addition, the data in the databases themselves need to be accessible when databases are updated technologically. As a result, the use of metadata becomes central. Metadata needs to be flexible enough to be accessible both today and in the future. And, it needs to be able to provide as much context as possible. Developing metadata standards that can encompass all possible futures while still serving our present (and the present and future for everyone) is still far off into the future.
January 2, 2021
It was an interesting read; like many history books, it feels to detailed at times, but this is just the way it is when reading academic books: They go the steps to make sure you understood why the argument is as it is (or at least think you did).
The topic was particularly interesting for me as my job is related to databases.
I wrote the most annotations for the section on cybernetics.
The topic was particularly interesting for me as my job is related to databases.
I wrote the most annotations for the section on cybernetics.
June 10, 2024
This is a fascinating book. Bowker's brilliance and originality shimmer through on every page. My intuition is that this book will speak to you if you are interested in the academic field of science and technology studies (STS), in thinking about the history of knowledge, or in the ways in which societies preserve their memory. In the following, I retrace the book's individual chapters and core arguments.
The introduction acquaints us with Bowker's ambition, which is to offer "a reading of the ways in which information technology in all its forms has become imbricated in the nature and production of knowldge over the past two hundred years" (p. 2). The sciences, Bowker intuits, are one of the very few institutions that profess to have a perfect memory of the past - hence his interest in studying how they reached this point. The chapter contains a very interesting treatise of the ways in which traces - both human and non-human - are an abundant feature of all forms of life. Later, Bowker elucidates that he is interested in memory practices which he defines as "acts of committing to record" which are "embedded within a range of practices (technical, formal, social)" (p. 7). One of Bowker's central hypotheses is that the information technologies of a given epoch define how memory is held - hence his assertion that with digital archiving "a new regime of technologies for holding and shaping experience has emerged" (p. 5). The author further mobilizes critical theories of the archive - centrally drawing from Derrida's Archive Fever - defining archives as both jussive and sequential. Jussive, because they define what can and cannot be remembered; sequential, because the establishment of new archives produce new memory epochs. A very interesting remark concerns the "exclusionary principle" (p. 12) of the archive which means that archives by virtue of remembering only certain facts/observations also constantly engage in the forgetting of others. Bowker also articulates that changes of information technology often mean data losses - and thus societal forgetting (p. 15). Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the chapter: "the tools we have to think about the past with are the tools of our own archive - so that we generally project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs (just as tend to understand the brain in terms of the dominant infrastructural technology of the day - from nineteenth-century hydraulics in Freud to the telephone switchboard in the 1920s to network infrastructure today)." (p. 18). Methodologically, the author clearly points out that to study memory practices we ought not search in the past, we must study the present. He also connects this to his recent work with Susan Leigh Star on classifications & standards - which he intends to study (p. 24). As you see, this first chapter is extremely interesting and provides food for a lot of thought.
The first empirical chapter tackles the science of Geology - which was one of the most widely practiced sciences in the 1830s. This was not of particular interest to me, even though the analysis is very astute. Basically, Bowker's argument is that geological scientists of the time enacted a representational imaginary of time and space. Synchronization and synchrony were central here. Social and natural time, through these processes, were brought into a unified form.
The second empirical chapter turned to the study of cybernetics in the 1960s. Again, not of major interest to me. Here, the fundamental point is that cyberneticians constructed imaginaries of memory destruction - which Bowker names "the empty archive". This was also related to the cybernetic aspiration to be a universal science that could make itself relevant to all kinds of worldly domains. "Cyberneticians in the 1950s and 1960s offfer a mode of remembering at a total remove; they offer memory as pure pattern - the facts can always be filled in later as and when needed." (p. 76).
The third chapter retraces the progressive victory and spread of the database as an information technology. An interesting point here is that databases emerge not from the computer revolution; instead, the relation between the two is the converse. Bowker retraces in this chapter the kinds of standardizing and infrastructural work that is necessary to build successful information infrastructure. "The bottom line is that no storage medium is permanent (CDs will not last anywhere near as long as books printed on acid free paper)" (p. 115) - what a foresight! In this chapter we clearly see the Foucauldian influences on Bowker (especially "The Order of Things"): "I maintain that we do not as a society have a series of separate and separable discourses about the past, each of which has its own problematic and development. Rather, I would argue, the boundaries between the disciplines are porous precisely because the same kind of information-processing technology is used in each case." (p. 136).
The fourth chapter on "The Mnemonic Deep", again, was not of particular interest to me.
Chapter five, however, is very intriguing because it boils down the ethical and political stakes of "our" (Western) knowledge- and memory-making practices. Essentially, Bowker here criticizes the continued universalism that taints many scientific discourses. Instead, all knowledge, not merely indigenous knowledge, is local. The chapter contains an interesting analysis of the ways in which different, radically incomparable things are made commensurate. I won't go into detail here.
The conclusion is very brief. Bowker highlights that "If we want the future to be other than it seems to be turning out, we must create a past that is other than it seems to have turned out. People, planets, and purgatory (Le Goff 1984) deserve multiple pasts" (p. 230). What a beautiful last sentence: "Only an open past can unlock the present and free the future." (p. 230).
In sum, this book provides many good reasons to find its very original claim plausible: information infrastructure deeply shapes the way in which societies remember and forget. Bowker's range is incredible, he mobilizes various strands of STS, philosophy, and natural scientific strands of the respective case studies he is working on. This is a book to revisit time and time again!
The introduction acquaints us with Bowker's ambition, which is to offer "a reading of the ways in which information technology in all its forms has become imbricated in the nature and production of knowldge over the past two hundred years" (p. 2). The sciences, Bowker intuits, are one of the very few institutions that profess to have a perfect memory of the past - hence his interest in studying how they reached this point. The chapter contains a very interesting treatise of the ways in which traces - both human and non-human - are an abundant feature of all forms of life. Later, Bowker elucidates that he is interested in memory practices which he defines as "acts of committing to record" which are "embedded within a range of practices (technical, formal, social)" (p. 7). One of Bowker's central hypotheses is that the information technologies of a given epoch define how memory is held - hence his assertion that with digital archiving "a new regime of technologies for holding and shaping experience has emerged" (p. 5). The author further mobilizes critical theories of the archive - centrally drawing from Derrida's Archive Fever - defining archives as both jussive and sequential. Jussive, because they define what can and cannot be remembered; sequential, because the establishment of new archives produce new memory epochs. A very interesting remark concerns the "exclusionary principle" (p. 12) of the archive which means that archives by virtue of remembering only certain facts/observations also constantly engage in the forgetting of others. Bowker also articulates that changes of information technology often mean data losses - and thus societal forgetting (p. 15). Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the chapter: "the tools we have to think about the past with are the tools of our own archive - so that we generally project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs (just as tend to understand the brain in terms of the dominant infrastructural technology of the day - from nineteenth-century hydraulics in Freud to the telephone switchboard in the 1920s to network infrastructure today)." (p. 18). Methodologically, the author clearly points out that to study memory practices we ought not search in the past, we must study the present. He also connects this to his recent work with Susan Leigh Star on classifications & standards - which he intends to study (p. 24). As you see, this first chapter is extremely interesting and provides food for a lot of thought.
The first empirical chapter tackles the science of Geology - which was one of the most widely practiced sciences in the 1830s. This was not of particular interest to me, even though the analysis is very astute. Basically, Bowker's argument is that geological scientists of the time enacted a representational imaginary of time and space. Synchronization and synchrony were central here. Social and natural time, through these processes, were brought into a unified form.
The second empirical chapter turned to the study of cybernetics in the 1960s. Again, not of major interest to me. Here, the fundamental point is that cyberneticians constructed imaginaries of memory destruction - which Bowker names "the empty archive". This was also related to the cybernetic aspiration to be a universal science that could make itself relevant to all kinds of worldly domains. "Cyberneticians in the 1950s and 1960s offfer a mode of remembering at a total remove; they offer memory as pure pattern - the facts can always be filled in later as and when needed." (p. 76).
The third chapter retraces the progressive victory and spread of the database as an information technology. An interesting point here is that databases emerge not from the computer revolution; instead, the relation between the two is the converse. Bowker retraces in this chapter the kinds of standardizing and infrastructural work that is necessary to build successful information infrastructure. "The bottom line is that no storage medium is permanent (CDs will not last anywhere near as long as books printed on acid free paper)" (p. 115) - what a foresight! In this chapter we clearly see the Foucauldian influences on Bowker (especially "The Order of Things"): "I maintain that we do not as a society have a series of separate and separable discourses about the past, each of which has its own problematic and development. Rather, I would argue, the boundaries between the disciplines are porous precisely because the same kind of information-processing technology is used in each case." (p. 136).
The fourth chapter on "The Mnemonic Deep", again, was not of particular interest to me.
Chapter five, however, is very intriguing because it boils down the ethical and political stakes of "our" (Western) knowledge- and memory-making practices. Essentially, Bowker here criticizes the continued universalism that taints many scientific discourses. Instead, all knowledge, not merely indigenous knowledge, is local. The chapter contains an interesting analysis of the ways in which different, radically incomparable things are made commensurate. I won't go into detail here.
The conclusion is very brief. Bowker highlights that "If we want the future to be other than it seems to be turning out, we must create a past that is other than it seems to have turned out. People, planets, and purgatory (Le Goff 1984) deserve multiple pasts" (p. 230). What a beautiful last sentence: "Only an open past can unlock the present and free the future." (p. 230).
In sum, this book provides many good reasons to find its very original claim plausible: information infrastructure deeply shapes the way in which societies remember and forget. Bowker's range is incredible, he mobilizes various strands of STS, philosophy, and natural scientific strands of the respective case studies he is working on. This is a book to revisit time and time again!
May 25, 2018
This book combines my interests in infrastructure, memory and Science & Technology Studies--so it is kind of an important text for my own work. It turns up as a citation in so much that I've read I simply had to give it a read. The book is pretty densely packed, but Bowker is an excellent writer. One of the reasons I came back to academia was reading the work of Stephen Jackson on repair. Jackson's advisor was Bowker...so it was also really interesting to follow this particular lineage of thinking.
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September 7, 2025lu pour un cours - étonnement beaucoup de choses que je savais déjà/pas forcément surprenantes mais franchement intéressant sur la manière dont les pratiques de mémoires/d’archivage façonnent non seulement la connaissance scientifiques mais aussi nos structures sociales et culturelles
globalement je dirais que c’est utile pour mieux historiciser la question et comprendre les aspects plus technique de cette dernière
globalement je dirais que c’est utile pour mieux historiciser la question et comprendre les aspects plus technique de cette dernière
December 11, 2015
This is an interesting book and I gained a lot of great insight into how memory practices chart to changes in economy and philosophical worldviews over time.
But what it achieves in uniqueness of argument, it loses in the difficulty of its writing style. Bowker draws, clearly, from French intellectuals like Foucault and Latour (only to name a few) and it seems like that fashion of writing has also rubbed off on this book. I found myself just trudging along at points, hoping to pick back up the thread once Bowker returned to the main support of his arguments.
But what it achieves in uniqueness of argument, it loses in the difficulty of its writing style. Bowker draws, clearly, from French intellectuals like Foucault and Latour (only to name a few) and it seems like that fashion of writing has also rubbed off on this book. I found myself just trudging along at points, hoping to pick back up the thread once Bowker returned to the main support of his arguments.
December 18, 2016
I had the privilege of working near Dr. John Isenhour and picked up this book. This information has continued to be practical in the working environment.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews