By Geoffrey C. Bowker
Winner, 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize given through the Society for Social stories of technological know-how (4S). and provided "Best details technology publication 2006" by means of the yank Society for info technology and know-how (ASIS&T).
The manner we checklist wisdom, and the internet of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, unavoidably impacts the information that we list. The methods we carry wisdom in regards to the past—in handwritten manuscripts, in published books, in dossier folders, in databases—shape the type of tales we inform approximately that prior. during this full of life and erudite examine the relation of our details infrastructures to our details, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the last 2 hundred years, info know-how has converged with the character and construction of medical wisdom. His tale weaves a course among the social and political paintings of constructing an particular, indexical reminiscence for science—the making of infrastructures—and the diversity of how we consistently reconfigure, lose, and regain the past.
At a time whilst reminiscence is so affordable and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and the way we elect to disregard. In Memory Practices within the Sciences he seems to be at 3 "memory epochs" of the 19th, 20th, and twenty-first centuries and their specific reconstructions and reconfigurations of medical wisdom. The 19th century's critical technology, geology, mapped either the social and the wildlife right into a unmarried time package deal (despite obvious discontinuities), as, differently, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. either, Bowker argues, packaged time in methods listed via their info applied sciences to allow site visitors among the social and usual worlds. state-of-the-art sciences of biodiversity, in the meantime, "database the realm" in a fashion that excludes sure areas, entities, and occasions. We use the instruments of the current to examine the prior, says Bowker; we venture onto nature our modes of organizing our personal affairs.
Read or Download Memory Practices in the Sciences PDF
Similar history & philosophy books
The nice biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' facts since it did not aid the case he used to be making. John Snow, the 'first epidemiologist' used to be doing not anything others had now not performed ahead of. Gregor Mendel, the intended 'founder of genetics' by no means grasped the elemental rules of 'Mendelian' genetics.
Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery
"Fabulous technology unearths lots of those findings to the final reader for the 1st time. usually startling and continuously mesmerizing, they express that a few of our most crucial medical theories have been at first approved purely simply because recognized scientists fudged facts, pulled rank, or have been propped up by means of non secular and political elites.
Divine Action and Natural Selection - Science, Faith and Evolution
The controversy among divine motion, or religion, and usual choice, or technology, is garnering great curiosity. This booklet ventures way past the standard, contrasting American Protestant and atheistic issues of view, and likewise comprises the views of Jews, Muslims, and Roman Catholics. It comprises arguments from some of the proponents of clever layout, creationism, and Darwinism, and in addition covers the delicate factor of ways to include evolution into the secondary college biology curriculum.
Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science
While that the examine of nonlinear dynamics got here into its personal in the
sctences, the point of interest of literary stories shifted towards neighborhood, fragmentary modes of
analysis within which texts have been now not considered as deterministic or predictable.
N. Katherine Hayles the following investigates parallels among modern literature and significant conception and the rising interdisciplinary box often called the
science of chaos. She reveals in either medical and literary discourse new interpretations of chaos, that is noticeable now not as illness yet as a locus of maximum
information and complexity. the hot paradigm of chaos comprises components that,
Hayles indicates, have been glaring in literary concept and literature ahead of they became
prominent within the sciences. She asserts that such similarities among the natural
and human sciences are the end result now not of direct effect yet of roots in a
common cultural matrix.
Hayles lines the evolution of the idea that of chaos and evaluates the paintings of
such theorists as Prigogine, Feigenbaum, and Mandelbrot, for whom chaos
entails an unpredictably open universe within which wisdom is proscribed to local
sites and clinical versions can by no means exhaust the probabilities of the particular. But
this view doesn't mean that scientists have given up the hunt for worldwide reasons of common phenomena, for chaos is conceived of as containing its own
form of order. Hayles envisions chaos as a double-edged sword: it may be viewed
either as a acceptance that illness performs a extra vital position in natural
processes than had hitherto been well-known or as an extension of order into areas
that had hitherto resisted formalization. She examines buildings and topics of
disorder within the schooling of Henry Adams, Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook,
and works by way of Stanislaw Lem. Hayles concludes via displaying how the writings of
poststmcturalist theorists contain critical beneficial properties of chaos theory-such as
an curiosity in referring to neighborhood websites to international stmctures; a notion of order and
disorder as interpenetrating instead of adverse; an expertise that during complex
systems small motives can result in big results; and an knowing that
complex platforms might be either deterministic and unpredictable.
Chaos sure will give a contribution to and brighten up present debates between chaos
theorists, cultural critics and cultural historians, serious theorists, literary
critics attracted to 19th- and twentieth-century literature, researchers in
nonlinear dynamics, and others fascinated by the relation among science
and tradition.
- Fabulous science
- Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age
- Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010
- Trees of life : a visual history of evolution
- The making of Islamic science
Additional info for Memory Practices in the Sciences
Example text
Aquinas was recognized a genius, she claims, because of his prodigious memory; Einstein because of his bril liant thinking. We can add a third term to this sequence, with the development of the human genome database. The canonical scientific act for our times (sequencing the genome) resonates with the social and technical turn to non narrative memory described by Manovich. I will give a name to the current epoch, the site of the memory practices explored in this book, by calling it the epoch of potential memory.
The second is that of the two natures—industrial and natural—converging onto this isotropic time. The third is that of synchronization—the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world together into a single archival framework. Informa tion practice—its metaphors and strategies—permitted the cohabitation of astronomy, political economy, industry, and geological science in this syn chronic world, and, in particular, it permitted a synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality.
162-163). The same horror of waywardness—and its solution through the imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework—was common in astron omy in this period. Consider the following proud announcement concerning Halley’s comet: “The return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. This has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (Anonymous 1836a, 160). ). The regular flow of time, itself inspired by the watch analogy, was the central discovery of astronomy, and thence of the human spirit: “In effect, we only know completely one single law; that is the law of constancy and uniformity It is to this simple idea that we seek to reduce all others, and it is uniquely in this reduction that science, for us, consists.