Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics: Cyberscholarship

Please join us for the fifth in the fall semester series of talks co-sponsored by the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics with the School of Informatics and Computing.

Speaker: Geoffrey Bowker, School of Information Sciences, University of
Pittsburgh
Topic: Cyberscholarship
Date: Friday, December 3, 2010
Time: 3:00pm-4:00pm
Place: Rm. 130, School of Informatics and Computing East, 919 E. 10th St.

Talk preceded by an informal gathering with cookies, tea, and coffee,
available at 2:45pm. There will be an informal meeting with graduate
students following the talk.

ABSTRACT
Although there has been a lot of work on cyberinfrastructure (the data and modeling subtending work in the natural and social sciences and the humanities), there has been relatively little written about the nature of academic output. We are still generically using the computer as an unwieldy typewriter. In this talk, I explore the twin needs of generating new questions to ask and of producing new forms of academic presentation.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor of and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences. For the past five years he has been serving as Executive Director of the Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University whose mission is to research and promote the use of science and technology for the common good. With Leigh Star, he co-authored Sorting Things Out: Classification and Practice (MIT Press, 1999) on the history and sociology of medical classifications of nursing work, diseases, viruses, and race. His book Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT Press, 2006) about formal and informal recordkeeping in science over the past two hundred years, which includes extensive discussion of biodiversity informatics, won the ASIST prize for best book in Information Science and 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. For more information, see:
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~gbowker

The Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics is supported by the School of Library and Information Science, School of Informatics and Computing, and Kelley School of Business.