Title of Presentation: Values into Infrastructure
Presenting work from studies of biodiversity science and environmental hydrology to show the various points at which values get folded in to very large scale databases.
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego.
His PhD is in History and Philosophy of Science at Melbourne University. He studies social and organizational
aspects of the development of very large scale infrastructures. His first book (Science on the Run, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
discussed the development of information practices in the oil industry. He has recently completed with Leigh Star a book
on the history and sociology of medical classifications (Sorting Things Out: Classification and Practice - published by
MIT Press in September 1999). This book looks at the classification of nursing work, diseases, viruses and race. He has
co-edited a volume on Computer Support Cooperative Work (Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work: Beyond
the Great Divide, LEA Press, 1997).
He is currently working on an NSF funded project to examine the mobility of knowledge
in distributed scientific collaborations. He has just finished the manuscript of a book, entitled Memory Practices in the
Sciences about how records are kept in a number of disciplines. He is on the steering committee of the University of
California Digital Cultures project. More information can be found at his website:
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker
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