Professor Geoffrey Bowker, University of California, Irvine will be Velux Visiting Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Technologies in Practice research group between February and June 2016. Bowker’s research is particular dedicated to investigate the use of web and other digital resources across a set of disciplines. He works with scholars to uncover ways in which new forms of knowledge are being (or could be) generated by creative use of these digital resources. For example: how did a complete database of classical Greek literature transform work in the classics; or how could intensive, long term monitoring of ecosystems feed into a new policy framework for sustainability?
Bowker is mostly known for his work on information infrastructure, which involves looking at shifting classification systems in medicine, distributed collaborative work practices in environmental science, data sharing practices and biodiversity informatics. His central analytic question here is how scientists in the various sciences contributing to the subject of biodiversity communicate both with each other and with policymakers – and in particular how do the data structures and practices in use affect this communication.
While he has numerous publications some of his most important work includes his book on information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, Science on the Run (MIT Press: 1994); his book co-authored with Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (MIT Press: 1999) and Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT Press: 2005). He is currently working on distributed scientific work, with an emphasis on social and organizational features of emerging scientific cyberinfrastructures. I am on the editorial board of The Information Society, Information and Organization, Metascience and Social Studies of Science.
For more details see http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker