G C Bowker
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 10833 |
|---|---|
| NOME | G C Bowker |
| PRENOMES | G C |
| SOBRENOME | Bowker |
| ASSINATURA | BOWKER G C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7920-0413 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 68 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 397 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 68 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1989 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Mirror, mirror. . . disco ball? On dancing with algorithmic double-goers
Algorithmic media proliferates. Alongside such proliferation, the familiar doubles of pre-digital daily life – the specters, phantoms, and apparitions found in folklore, novels, film, and music – are maturing into new kinds of fluid and apparently agentic Others. Such Others – data-driven doppelgangers, literally “double-goers” – increasingly co-constitute their primaries across space and time, entangling erstwhile human users into a more-than-hu…
Remembering Bruno
The author recounts their first encounter with Bruno Latour in 1980, marking the beginning of a profound intellectual and personal relationship. Latour's generosity and innovative thinking deeply influenced the author's academic journey, despite their ambivalence toward actor-network theory. Latour's work, characterized by its generative and inclusive approach, contrasted with the more defensive academic norms. While the author critiqued Latour's…
En souvenir de Bruno
L'auteur raconte sa première rencontre avec Bruno Latour en 1980, qui a marqué le début d'une profonde relation intellectuelle et personnelle. La générosité et la pensée novatrice de Latour ont profondément influencé le parcours académique de Geoff Bowker, malgré son ambivalence à l'égard de la théorie de l'acteur-réseau. Le travail de Latour, caractérisé par son approche générative et inclusive, contrastait avec les normes académiques plus défen…
Working with Olga Kuchinskaya and Katie Vann
Humanistic infrastructure studies
Bridging third wave HCI with infrastructure studies, this paper examines the relationship between infrastructural visibility, breakdown, and experience through an existentialist lens. We present and theorize a state of infrastructural functionality – which we term ‘hyper-functionality’ – that renders infrastructure visible because of its experiential effects on end-users, not necessarily because of malfunction. We introduce this term through the …
Phenotyping as disciplinary practice
The narrative of the digital phenotype as a transformative vector in healthcare is nearly identical to the concept of "data drivenness" in other fields such as law enforcement. We examine the role of a prescription drug monitoring program in California-a computerized law enforcement surveillance program enabled by a landmark Supreme Court case that upheld "broad police powers"-in the interprofessional conflict between physicians and law enforceme…
Numbers or no numbers in science studies
This article analyzes my own research trajectory with respect to the qualitative/quantitative divide in science studies and situates my work in the field
Prospecting (in) the data sciences
Data science is characterized by engaging heterogeneous data to tackle real world questions and problems. But data science has no data of its own and must seek it within real world domains. We call this search for data “prospecting” and argue that the dynamics of prospecting are pervasive in, even characteristic of, data science. Prospecting aims to render the data, knowledge, expertise, and practices of worldly domains available and tractable to…
The logic of domains
The logic of domains has become a key organizing principle for contemporary computing projects and in broader science policy. The logic parses collectives of expertise into 'domains' that are to be studied or engaged in order to inform computational advancements and/or interventions on the domains themselves. The concept of a domain is set against a proposition that there is a more general, domain independent or agnostic technique that can serve …
Unsupervised by any other name
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of different machine learning models is applied to Big Data as a way to turn data into valuable knowledge. The rhetoric is that ensuing predictions work well-with a high degree of autonomy and automation. We argue that we need to analyze the process of applying machine learning in depth and highlight at what point human knowledge production takes place in seemingly autonomous work. This article reintroduce…
The Empire of the Future
This rich collection analyzes science in the archives over the past several thousand years. The chapters work together to tell stories of ambitious attempts to provide timeless data for science, which will be used for generations to come-ranging from ancient astronomy to geology to life-logging and the development of web search. They also demonstrate convincingly that archives are powerful forces across the sciences-every science discussed has an…
An Afterword to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’
Transparenz jenseits individueller Größenordnungen
Kategoriale Arbeit und Grenzinfrastrukturen
A Preface to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’
Energy and the Archive
This paper looks at ways to think about the relationship between the knowledge that we produce and its social origins without falling into a naïve determinism. The central arguments are that our modes of knowledge discovery and articulation are deeply social: both through the role of energy forms and bureaucratic practices
Energía y archivo
Este texto aborda las maneras de pensar la articulación entre el conocimiento que producimos y su origen social sin caer en un determinismo ingenuo. Los principales argumentos son que nuestros modos de descubrimiento y de enunciación del conocimiento son profundamente sociales: a través del papel que desempeñan tanto las formas de energía como las prácticas burocráticas
L'énergie et l'archive
Ce texte aborde des manières de penser l'articulation entre les connaissances que nous produisons et leurs origines sociales qui ne succombent pas à un déterminisme naïf. Les principaux arguments sont que nos modes de découverte et d'énonciation des connaissances sont profondément sociaux : à la fois à travers le rôle des formes d'énergie et des pratiques bureaucratiques
Knowledge Infrastructures
Knowledge Infrastructures
This issue of Science and Technology Studies is the fi nal one of four in total published this year focusing on the topic of Knowledge Infrastructures. Across the four issues we have presented fourteen papers (thirteen research articles and one discussion paper) and four book reviews. In this final editorial we fi rst take a look at the issues raised by the fi nal batch of articles, then take a step back to review the collection as a whole, consi…
Knowledge infrastructures
Knowledge infrastructures
The focus of this special issue is on Knowledge Infrastructures. We have witnessed important changes in research and knowledge production in recent decades associated with developments in information technologies and infrastructures. In some circles these changes are promoted as a transformative force enabling new forms of investigation, but they may also be perceived as buttressing existing forms of research. These developments aim to pull peopl…
Science and Technology, Social Study of
Susan Leigh Star Special Issue
Susan Leigh Star died suddenly, unexpectedly almost 5 years ago. She was my partner, lover, collaborator, and friend. The collection of articles in this special issue brings together rich research
Emerging Configurations of Knowledge Expression
Biodiversity Datadiversity
Biodiversity is a data-intense science, drawing as it does on data from a large number of disciplines in order to build up a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth. This paper argues that as sets of heterogeneous databases are made to converge, there is a layering of values into the emergent infrastructure. It is argued that this layering process is relatively irreversible, and that it operates simultaneously at a very con…
Science friction
When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call 'science friction'. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata--usually viewed simply as 'data about data', describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets--serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that me…
The Multiple Bodies of the Medical Record
This article argues that the medical record is an important focus for sociological research. In medical work, the modern patient's body that Foucault has so aptly described is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work, and the medical record plays a crucial role in this production. It does not simply represent this body's history and geography; it is a central element in the material rewriting of these. Simultaneously, the record f…
Unsupervised by any other name
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of different machine learning models is applied to Big Data as a way to turn data into valuable knowledge. The rhetoric is that ensuing predictions work well-with a high degree of autonomy and automation. We argue that we need to analyze the process of applying machine learning in depth and highlight at what point human knowledge production takes place in seemingly autonomous work. This article reintroduce…
The logic of domains
The logic of domains has become a key organizing principle for contemporary computing projects and in broader science policy. The logic parses collectives of expertise into 'domains' that are to be studied or engaged in order to inform computational advancements and/or interventions on the domains themselves. The concept of a domain is set against a proposition that there is a more general, domain independent or agnostic technique that can serve …
Second Nature once Removed
Taking the example of large-scale technological and organizational change in the nineteenth century, it is argued that time and space are reconfigured socially by infrastructural change, and that these reconfigurations are then mirrored in cultural and scientific texts. The key claim is that organization and technology need to be looked at together: dropping out one or the other prevents the uncovering of causal links
The Artisans of Desire
Prospecting (in) the data sciences
Data science is characterized by engaging heterogeneous data to tackle real world questions and problems. But data science has no data of its own and must seek it within real world domains. We call this search for data “prospecting” and argue that the dynamics of prospecting are pervasive in, even characteristic of, data science. Prospecting aims to render the data, knowledge, expertise, and practices of worldly domains available and tractable to…
Making an Issue out of a Standard
The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills' classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the auth…
Pure, Real and Rational Numbers
Philip Agre is an Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge UP, 1997), and co-editor (with Stanley J. Rosenschein) of Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency (MIT Press, 1996), (with Marc Rothenberg) of Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape (MIT Press, 1997), and (with Douglas Schuler) of Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Studies of Comp…
The Archive
How Things Change
curvilinear figures which can represent large technical systems. These figures have many affinities with Cartesian space, which classical science used to describe the real. . . . This organization of the very large scale sociotechnical thus enters into resonance with the scientific representation of nature, with which it shares a model of reality. And, as Ehrhard stresses: 'the network creates and gives form to an imaginary space', and this forma…
Working with Olga Kuchinskaya and Katie Vann
Phenotyping as disciplinary practice
The narrative of the digital phenotype as a transformative vector in healthcare is nearly identical to the concept of "data drivenness" in other fields such as law enforcement. We examine the role of a prescription drug monitoring program in California-a computerized law enforcement surveillance program enabled by a landmark Supreme Court case that upheld "broad police powers"-in the interprofessional conflict between physicians and law enforceme…
All Together Now
This paper looks at interconnections between social, scientific, and technical time over the period since the Enlightenment. The underlying argument is that each of these can be woven into a single narrative of our experience and description of time over that period. In particular, I maintain that the synchronization of social and natural time into ever smaller, interchangeable units has culminated today in the evacuation of the narrative of prog…
The Artisans of Desire
Second Nature once Removed
Taking the example of large-scale technological and organizational change in the nineteenth century, it is argued that time and space are reconfigured socially by infrastructural change, and that these reconfigurations are then mirrored in cultural and scientific texts. The key claim is that organization and technology need to be looked at together: dropping out one or the other prevents the uncovering of causal links
How Things Change
curvilinear figures which can represent large technical systems. These figures have many affinities with Cartesian space, which classical science used to describe the real. . . . This organization of the very large scale sociotechnical thus enters into resonance with the scientific representation of nature, with which it shares a model of reality. And, as Ehrhard stresses: 'the network creates and gives form to an imaginary space', and this forma…
Opting for Oil
A Miller’s Tale
Of Lungs and Lungers
The experience of a long-term chronic illness weaves together problems in biography, the body, and the cultural and organizational meanings of the disease. Time meets infrastructure; experience meets classification. We present here a close reading of two studies of tuberculosis: Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain and Julius Roth's empirical work Timetables. Drawing on research in medical sociology and information science, we show how the traj…
The Multiple Bodies of the Medical Record
This article argues that the medical record is an important focus for sociological research. In medical work, the modern patient's body that Foucault has so aptly described is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work, and the medical record plays a crucial role in this production. It does not simply represent this body's history and geography; it is a central element in the material rewriting of these. Simultaneously, the record f…
Archival technology in the historical sciences 1800–1997
Taking examples from the science of geology in the 1830s and floristics over the past two decades, it is argued that the technology of information storage and retrieval dominant at the time serves as both means of archiving scientific results and as metaphor for the interpretation of the earth as an archival system. It is maintained that the interplay between means and metaphor provides a site for the importation and exploration of techniques fro…
Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage
Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage
Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage: Some Recent Literature of Cyberspace Geoffrey C. Bowker (bio) What is this thing called cyberspace? According to some, we are witnessing the emergence of the global mind: a revolutionary change in human practice of no less import than the invention of printing, or, before it, of language. Most of the contributors to the five books under review here adopt this position—though, like a box of fireworks into wh…
Sorting Things Out
A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions. What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of …
Invisible Mediators of Action
This article is a methodological think piece about the ways in which classifications (and standards) impinge in myriad ways on our daily lives. We argue that although they are frequently invisible to us, they are highly political and ethically charged. We suggest 4 principles garnered from our own research and that of others that can together be used to give a picture of their scope and reach: recognizing their ubiquity, analyzing their material …
Changing Life
Reviewed by: Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities * Geoffrey C. Bowker (bio) Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities. Edited by Peter Taylor, Saul E. Halfon, and Paul N. Edwards. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Pp. 230; notes/references, index. $19.95. Biodiversity, it is generally agreed, is a good thing. Deciding what kind of a good thing it is, and what to do about it, is complicated. There ar…
Biodiversity Datadiversity
Biodiversity is a data-intense science, drawing as it does on data from a large number of disciplines in order to build up a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth. This paper argues that as sets of heterogeneous databases are made to converge, there is a layering of values into the emergent infrastructure. It is argued that this layering process is relatively irreversible, and that it operates simultaneously at a very con…
Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day, Information Ecologies
Pure, Real and Rational Numbers
Philip Agre is an Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge UP, 1997), and co-editor (with Stanley J. Rosenschein) of Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency (MIT Press, 1996), (with Marc Rothenberg) of Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape (MIT Press, 1997), and (with Douglas Schuler) of Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Studies of Comp…
Playing at work
This paper analyses the latest management assumptions and theories of playing at work, by examining how management strategies, especially relating to new media, invoke elements of play to create distinct and competing genres of discourse. After a brief overview of the latest management crisis of innovation, we will provide a few definitions of play, followed by a short summary of where play and other competing dialogues converge and overlap at wo…
Ecological storytelling and collaborative scientific activities
No abstract available
ECSCW 2003 Computer Supported Scientific Collaboration (CSSC) workshop report
The Eighth European Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference (ECSCW 2003) provided a venue to gather researchers interested in the study of scientific collaborations and their technology support. The organizers, Karen S. Baker, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Helena Karasti, started to work together in 2002 on a National Science Foundation funded BioDiversity and EcoInformatics (BDEI) project 'Designing an Infrastructure for Heterogeneity in Ecosyst…
In Memoriam
From Newspeak to Cyberspeak
At one point in time the Soviet Union witnessed a vitrolic attack on cybernetics as the product of Western capitalists seeking to turn their workforce into robots. Some ten years later, in that same Soviet Union, cybernetics was considered the "governor" of the revolutionary state. Wrote Engineer Admiral Aksel'Berg, chairman of the Council on Cybernetics, in 1961: "[Cybernetics] aspires to study all control processes in living nature, in producti…
The Digital Sublime
Reviewed by: The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace Geoffrey C. Bowker (bio) The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. By Vincent Mosco. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. ix+218. $27.95. There was much talk in the 1830s of an end to history being ushered in by the railway and the steamboat. With space and time having been annihilated, we would no longer be tied to locale, and in the future there would be no political strugg…
Information Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practices
Special Issue
Time, Money, and Biodiversity
This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Money, Memory, and Discourse Modalities of Implosion: The Language of Money in Biodiversity Discourse Modalities of Particularity: The Tree of Life Conclusions Notes
Sociology (38 obras) · Computer Science (35 obras) · Philosophy (26 obras) · Political science (24 obras) · Epistemology (20 obras) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (17 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Data science (11 obras) · Engineering (11 obras) · Art (9 obras)