Memory Practices in the Sciences

Citation

Bawden, D. (2006), "Memory Practices in the Sciences", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 62 No. 5, pp. 645-646. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410610688804

Geoffrey Bowker, is director of the Centre for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University in California, whose mission, his web site tells us, is to promote science and technology for the common good. His main interests are in classification and standardisation, and the ways in which these feed into, and determine, the structure of scientific knowledge. His previous book, Sorting Things Out (Bowker and Starr, 2000), was generally well‐received as a deeply considered view of these issues, tangential to the information science approach to these issues, but highly relevant to it.

This new book examines – in a strictly scientific context – the relations between information infrastructures and the “stories” which science tells about its objects, which form, in Bowker's view, the knowledge base of science. It is focused on memory; both personal memory and the exosomatic memories created by books, journals, databases, classifications, and so on. It also examines, as a central feature, those things which we choose not to remember, or actively to forget; particularly relevant in a world in which the gathering and storing of information is simpler and cheaper than at any time in the past.

It is therefore a book partly about science, partly about classification, and – in large measure – about technology. As Bowker puts it in the introduction, the book “offers a reading of the ways in which information technology in all its forms has become imbrocated [sic] in the nature and production of knowledge over the past two hundred years”. It is therefore also, although its author might not regard it as such, a work of information history, and a very valuable contribution to one strand of this developing discipline (Bawden, 2006; Black, 2006).

It is based round a very detailed consideration of three cases of the information infrastructure and practices of one of the sciences in a specific time period: geology in the 1830s, with its developing vistas of space and time; cybernetics in the 1950s, wit its emphasis on abstract form, rather than temporally sequenced data,; and the study of environmental diversity at the start of the twenty‐first century, in a chapter entitled “databasing the world”, with computational taxonomy at its core.

In some parts of the book, Bowker deals explicitly with topics of immediate concern to the information professions, most particularly metadata, and the ways in which data may be treated in a standardised manner over time. In a chapter on the “mnemonic deep”, the author returns to his interests in classification, and in particular to those things which cannot be classified, or classified only with great difficulty, or classified in multiple ways. There is also a particularly interesting section on the validity and value of “local knowledge”. However, even when this immediacy is lacking, there is still much that is of direct relevance to the foundations of the information sciences.

This is not an easy book to read; it demands concentration, some basic scientific understanding, and – for this reviewer at least – recourse to a dictionary from time to time. It is erudite and scholarly, and its footnotes and passing references are in themselves a source of great interest and stimulation of pathways of thought. For those interesting in an unconventional look at the foundations of our discipline, it will repay detailed study.

Bowker's web site tells that at the time of writing (June 2006) his next book, to be titled How to Read a Database, was five words long. It should be worth waiting for.