Web

Personal Website

http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~gbowker

Affiliation Website

http://www.ischool.pitt.edu/

Personal Information

First Name

Geoffrey

Last Name

Bowker

Title

Professor

Affiliation

iSchool, University of Pittsburgh

Short Biography

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburgh iSchool. For the past five years, he has been serving as Executive Director, Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University – a center whose mission is to research and promote the use of science and technology for the common good. He was previously Professor in and Chair of the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. 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. His recent 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, was published by MIT Press in February 2006 and won the ASIST prize for best book in Information Science as well as the Fleck Prize for best book in Social Studies of Science. He is currently working on a book about how to read databases – how to recognize the social, cultural and moral values that are embedded in their construction and how to scope the range of possible emergent stories and the range of stories which cannot be told. More information, including an extended cv and a number of publications can be found at: http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~gbowker.

Research Interests

How information infrastructures grow and are sustained; scientific cyberinfrastructure; cyberscholarship in the humanities and social sciences; large scale distributed collabaration; databases and the production of knowledge

History

Member for

7 years 52 weeks

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