reviews.indd


Book Reviews 

Bowker, Geoff rey C. Memory Practices in 
the Sciences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 
Press (Inside Science), 2006. 312 p. alk. 
paper, $34.95 (ISBN: 0262025892). LC 
2005-50492. 

Each of the nouns in the title Memory 
Practices in the Sciences is scrutinized and 
redefined in this interdisciplinary study 
by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Executive Direc-
tor of the Center for Science, Technology, 
and Society at Santa Clara University. In 
two previous books, Science on the Run: 
Information Management and Industrial 
Science at Schlumberger, 1920–1940 (1994) 
and Sorting Things Out: Classifi cation and 
Its Consequences (with Susan Leigh Star, 
1999), Bowker investigated the role of 
information practices in the industrial 
age through case studies. That investiga-
tion continues in this book with in-depth 
studies of nineteenth-century geology, 
twentieth-century cybernetics, and the 
contemporary science of biodiversity. 
A volume in MIT’s Inside Science series 
on the sociology of science and technol-
ogy, Bowker’s wide-ranging work also 
partakes of elements of the history and 
philosophy of science. 

Bowker’s definition of memory practic-
es is straightforward: “how we configure 
the world and ourselves to maintain an 
active memory of the past.” He is dealing 
not so much with individual memories as 
with memory as a social phenomenon. 
He finds that some memory practices 
are embedded in the natural world (for 
example, paths through the woods that 
have been “blazed” by previous travel-
ers), some are implicit in social norms, 
some are inscribed in laws and protocols, 
while still others are consciously created 
at a particular time and place for a par-
ticular purpose. Bowker refers to the con-
tent of a particular retention of the past 
as the archive, observing that “archives 
begin with inaugural acts that wipe out 
a past and define a period ‘from now on’ 

as the present.” A second key 
concept is the epoch, referring 
to the way in which past time is 
configured in a given archive. 
Each discipline, according to 
Bowker, has its own commonly 
accepted origin myth, its own 
archive, and classification of 
past time. Bowker is especially interested 
in the problem of maintaining a usable 
past given the incompatibility of these 
archives and the added complications of 
constant political, social, and technologi-
cal change. He circles around the question 
whether science can ever know “wie es 
eigentlich gewesen ist” (von Ranke’s elusive 
historical truth). Despite introducing 
some elements of post-modernism, he 
never abandons traditional epistemology. 
It’s just that our memory practices make 
the task of knowing “how things really 
were” hard, if not impossible. 

Bowker maintains that the discourse 
of each of the three sciences under inves-
tigation is structured around the latest 
information technology of the period. 
Thus the cosmology of the science of 
geology, as articulated by Charles Lyell, 
was inspired by factory production, the 
railroad, and the steamship. Lyell’s view 
of the earth’s history is compared to an 
accountant’s ledger, in which nature’s 
economy is balanced. The central meta-
phor of cybernetics, by contrast, is tied to 
computer technologies, where memory is 
pure pattern and all particulars are lost in 
an ultra abstract model that claims to sub-
sume all disciplines and makes the past 
irrelevant. Finally, the information model 
for the science of biodiversity is the data-
base, the creation of vast repositories of 
data that can be accessed, combined, and 
interpreted at will. Bowker does not seem 
to be claiming that information technol-
ogy determines science or vice versa, but 
rather that they interact with each other, 
or perhaps reflect a common worldview. 

478 



Each of the three cases is explored with 
masterful command of both basic science 
and the secondary literature, although 
the parallels among the three cases are 
not always convincingly demonstrated, 
in my view. 

Librarians may be especially interested 
in the section on biodiversity, with its at-
tention to problems of creating and main-
taining information in databases. Bowker 
believes that standards and protocols are 
essential, but that there is no such thing 
as a universal, permanent standard. The 
longevity of data depends on metadata 
and the ability to translate between disci-
plines. He argues for enhanced metadata 
that will capture the wider context in 
which data was created. He also makes 
the unpopular point—music to the ears 
of the library profession—that mainte-
nance of the information infrastructure 
is important. In other words, more cata-
logers and specialists in systematics are 
needed. Problems in classification are 
explored with examples from botany, 
species, fossils, soils, landscape topol-
ogy, and ecological communities. It is 
demonstrated beyond doubt that no clas-
sification system can ever be perfect, not 
because of human error, but because of 
real tensions in the definitions within the 
sciences themselves. Bowker cautions that 
to attempt to create a “global panopticon” 
would be misguided at best. 

There has been space here to mention 
only a handful of the interesting ideas 
that can be found on every page—in-
deed, every paragraph—of this book. 
My chief criticism is that the writing is 
sometimes disjointed and rambling, and 
the many digressions and allusions to 
people and ideas from Plato to Proust 
to Derrida can be distracting. The ideal 
reader would need to be familiar with 
current theory in information science 
as well as postmodern theory. Never-
theless, I think that every reader will 
find much to ponder in this provoca-
tive exploration of the relationship of 
the present to the past.—Jean Alexander, 
Carnegie Mellon University 

Book Reviews 479 

Foot, Mirjam M. Bookbinders at Work: Their 
Role and Methods. Newcastle, Del.: Oak 
Knoll; London: The British Library, 
2006. 163 p. $59.95 (ISBN 1584561688 
[US]; 0712349014 [UK]). 

Book bindings of the hand-press period 
(1455–1830) range in sophistication from 
the simple paper wrappers of a seven-
teenth-century child’s catechism to the 
extraordinarily ornate gold-tooled, red-
dyed, goatskin covers created for the king 
of France. For us today, it is easy to see in 
the manner of binding either delight in 
ornament or its absence, the whim of an 
aristocratic collector, or the extravagance 
of a bookseller hoping to make a sale 
to a wealthy customer. To take just one 
example of early modern book decora-
tion: books decorated with sprinkled or 
stained edges. Speckles were usually red, 
or mixed red and green or red and blue, 
or edges were stained in solid colors such 
as red, yellow, green, even black. Why 
these techniques? These colors? Were 
they an expression of a purchaser’s or a 
bookbinder’s mood? Were they the paints 
or dyes that just happened to be available 
at the time? Readers of Mirjam Foot’s 
book on binding quickly learn how naïve 
assumptions of randomness are. Almost 
every aspect of a binding is suff used with 
meaning and historical clues, sememes 
waiting to be deciphered and understood 
by the librarian or the historian with the 
eyes to see. Our presumption must always 
be: What greater or more subtle purpose 
is being served by the bookbinder ’s 
choice? What traditions of the guild or of 
the culture have been respected and per-
petuated? As Thomas Mann refl ected in 
Doktor Faustus: “Ornament and meaning 
have always run alongside each other. . . . 
Let no one claim that nothing is being 
communicated.” 

To stay for a moment with the example 
at hand: we learn in Foot’s book that 
sprinkled edges on books were not just 
decorative, but often helped hide the dirt 
on the edges; that red and green sprin-
kling said “French” to German readers; 
that sprinkling with red alone suggested