Memory Practices in the Sciences by Geoffrey Bowker. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 261 pp. ISBN: 0-262-02589-2. What are memory practices and just how are they practiced? How does an archive facilitate various forms of remembering? How are processes of archiving and remembering structured through information technology and scientific inquiry? Geoffrey Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences raises these questions through an elaborate investigation of three scientific epochs, geological sciences in the 1830s, cybernetics in the 1960s, and biodiversity in the 2000s. For Bowker, evolving methods and standards for data gathering constitute a kind of memory practice that informs how we understand the past in relation to the present. The foundational argument in his book is that memory practices constitute a site where ideology and knowledge converge. As such, this work explores the ways in which we reconfigure the past through technologies and social processes for recording and remembering the present, thus Bowker emphasizes the intricate relationships between cultural, social, political, and technological dynamics in forming our memory infrastructures and practice. Throughout the book, Bowker analyses the ways in which three specific technologies—the watch, the computer, and the database—aligned themselves within specific scientific domains to shape memory practices and data standards within the fields of geological sciences, cybernetics, and biodiversity. Although not articulated as such, Bowker’s approach demonstrates the historical continuity of these practices and standards in terms of temporal and spatial reconfiguration. As Bowker moves along this continuum, he discusses the ways in which changes to memory practices within these distinct epochs reflect varying notions of time and space, from the standardization of time and the collapse of time and space through the advent of the watch, the universalization of history through developments in computers, to reconfigurable pasts with database technologies. Through Bowker’s continuum, we see how certain forms of memory modality are informed by specific shifts in technological change, in turn shaping how archives and memory are imagined and materialized. In Chapter 1, Bowker looks specifically at geological sciences in the 1830s, rooted in the industrial revolution. Watches encouraged a regular flow of social time and were then used as an analogous metaphor for the regulation of natural time in the geological sciences. Bowker argues that this specific memory modality creates an imposition of order in such a way as to evacuate humanity and subjectivity from notions of “naturalization.” Coupled with the industrial revolution, geological practice underwent this evacuation of subjectivity and humanity by spatializing time and thus regulating earth’s history and ultimately writing out the human fingerprint from the earth’s archive.