BDEI 3 - Participant Details: Geoffrey C. Bowker

Name:

Geoffrey C. Bowker

Affiliation:

Bio

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Executive Director, Regis and Dianne McKenna Chair Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University. He was previously Professor in and Chair of 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 information infrastructures. His first book (Science on the Run, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) discussed the development of information practices in the oil industry. He has written 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 has, since his invitation to join the biodiversity subcommittee of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology been working in the field of biodiversity and environmental informatics. He has recently completed a digital government funded project on long term databases in environmental science (http://pal.lternet.edu/dm/projects/02bdei/). His next book, entitled Memory Practices in the Sciences about formal and informal recordkeeping in science over the past two hundred years, which includes extensive discussion of biodiversity informatics, will be published by MIT Press. He was 2002-2003 member of an OECD working group on international data sharing in science (http://dataaccess.sdsc.edu/) - the report can be found at this address. He is currently working on an NSF funded project at the San Diego Computer Center on organizational and social dimensions of developing scientific cyberinfrastructures. More information, including a number of publications can be found at his website: http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker.

Work:

I am interesting the development of long term, large scale environmental databases - in particular the new social and organizational forms which get developed as these are being constructed.

Recommended URLs:

http://epl.scu.edu/~gbowker/pubs.htm

http://interoperability.ucsd.edu

http://dataaccess.ucsd.edu

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, U.S Geological Survey National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) and NASA.

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