Reviews for Spatial Cognition III

The average rating for Spatial Cognition III based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-18 00:00:00 Mark Aldridge I just finished reading Geoffrey Bowker's Memory Practices in the Sciences for the book club over at Reading Information Sciences. I gave myself a break and allowed myself to read it at a leisurely pace, a luxury I rarely have anymore. At the heart of the book, is Bowker's examination of the ways in which "acts of committing to record" are socially imbued practices affecting our conception of the past in ways that. As a consequence, affect our present and future. Bowker begins with the effects of industrialization on memory practices in geology. For me, what stands out is: The ways accounting practices used during the Industrial Revolution were transferred onto Geology (and geologic ways of deciphering the age of the earth) by Lyell and others. Lyell argued that the earth itself isn't "irregular," rather that it is just a bad archivist. What Lyell constructed was a spatio-temporal systemization that moved away from seeing the history of the earth as a series as catastrophic events. Methods of organizing work and the workplace were used to explain how the earth ages at regular intervals, rather than by events such as earthquakes and floods. He moved away from creationist theories of the earth's age. Bowker discusses how this (and other geologic theories of the time) privileged Western Europe and aided imperial interests and burgeoning globalization. Bowker follows this approach to memory practices by looking at cybernetics, and its focus on semantic memory - "memory as pure pattern" (pg 76). Bowker sees cybernetics as working from universalism. Theories of cybernetics during the mid-twentieth century posited that cybernetics removes the need for memory as it worked to create a system that could hold all information equally, like a universal discipline. To work, cybernetics must be general. And through cybernetic systems, history becomes just a part of a classification scheme, a way of patterning. And as a result, Bowker argues, memory needs to be destroyed to create unity . Bowker writes: "First, past disciplines are destroyed: they need to be created anew from first principles Second, an individual experimenter must destroy his or her knowledge of previous experiments. Third, one result of this double destruction will be the discovery by cybernetics that memory itself is epiphenomenal (pg 101). As Bowker later notes, though, all data is always collected within a context. In cybernetic systems, context is eliminated, eliminating important information about how and why data has been collected. We lose the reason(s) behind collection methodologies which are almost always discipline specific. Early in chapter 3, "Databasing the World: Biodiversity and the 2000s," Bowker writes "The miracle of memory in our time is that memory practices are materially rampant, invasive, implicated in the core of our being and of our understanding of the world - and yet we experience them and discourse about them in terms of their ideal ramifications on some hypostasized entity created to void materiality from the equation: the individual, the nation-state, the people, and so forth" (pg 109). What Bowker broaches, in this chapter, is the way we as humans often take ourselves outside of nature when we create our ways of organizing and controlling nature. In addition, he examines the ways in which western peoples' have created systems that place other peoples (as a way of colonialization) classified as 'nature,' while placing their own practices as 'culture' and outside of these modes of classification. As the chapter progresses, Bowker leads up to a discussion of how we can read databases both materially and discursively. Drawing from Derrida's discussions of how technologies can create new kinds of 'traces.' From these premises, Bowker argues that to 'read' databases, we need to look at what isn't categorized or classified. What is classified is considered important, politically, economically, ideologically, etc. By examining what is left out of these systems, we can start to form the context of systems. He notes that "If certain kinds of entities are being excluded from entering into the database we are creating, and if those entities share the feature that they are singular in space and time, then we are producing a set of models of the world that - despite its avowed historicity - is constraining us generally to converge on descriptions of the world in terms of repeatable entities: not because the world is so but because this is the nature of our manipulable data structures" (pg 146). What this means is that those entities that are named are studied, and once studied, are considered relevant subjects for future study. The unnamed become unimportant, and the systems created around those things we name are not created to support a place for the unnamed. In biodiversity work, researchers from multiple disciplines using multiple discipline-specific methods and contexts deposit data into common databases. In addition, the data in the databases themselves need to be accessible when databases are updated technologically. As a result, the use of metadata becomes central. Metadata needs to be flexible enough to be accessible both today and in the future. And, it needs to be able to provide as much context as possible. Developing metadata standards that can encompass all possible futures while still serving our present (and the present and future for everyone) is still far off into the future.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-03 00:00:00 Mark Davis It was an interesting read; like many history books, it feels to detailed at times, but this is just the way it is when reading academic books: They go the steps to make sure you understood why the argument is as it is (or at least think you did). The topic was particularly interesting for me as my job is related to databases. I wrote the most annotations for the section on cybernetics.