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Memory Practices in the Sciences. By Geoffrey C. Bowker. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. xi, 261 pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-262-02589-2.
Memory, not only in the sciences, is Geoffrey C. Bowker's touchstone in his far-ranging consideration of memory practices of the past two hundred years. Memory requires classifications-slots into which things to be memorized can be put for storage, whether in an individual mind, a shared cultural archive, or an electronic database. The present classifies and maintains its information with an eye to what the future might need, so memory is deeply involved with ways of knowing and with perception of the things to be remembered and of self and with time. Time can be and has been conceived of in a variety of ways-the synchronie and diachronic do not exhaust the possibilities. Technologies for memory shape storage, maintenance, and recall. Recall is not the inevitable or even desirable end of stored memory; forgetting can be the goal, enabled by storage.
It is not clear who the audience is for this book. Bowker's language and style of organization-the accumulation of abstraction deployed in place of reasoned argument-does not show evidence of anyone questioning the presentation of a great volume of data that refuses to become concrete. There are interesting and thoughtful ideas here, but they are not clearly presented or argued.
Bowker returns to memory as he gathers a vast number of ideas, methods, and data that he would join together as being pertinent. Here, in a loose order from abstract to concrete- (loose in part because Bowker...