Introduction to Library Trends 47 (2) Fall 1998: How Classifications Work: Problems and Challenges in an Electronic Age

published or submitted for publicatio

Values in design

Focusing on socio-technical design with values as a critical component in the design process

Science on the run: Information management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger (1920-1940)

Pourquoi ce titre ? Si la traduction du sous-titre ne présente pas d’ambiguïté, celle du titre Science on the run est plus sujette à interprétation. Bowker situe cette dénomination dans un contexte explicatif. « Les scientifiques, qui suivaient dans les pas des foreurs de Wildcats ont dû se faire par eux-mêmes à l’industrie pétrolière. Comme il n’existait pas, en fait, de discipline propre à la prospection et à l’évaluation des gisements pétroliers, des spécialistes issus de toute une variét..

On the value of "useless data": Infrastructures, biodiversity, and policy.

As the ability to meaningfully process increasingly large quantities of data has improved, the need for systems to support the aggregation and subsequent use of disparate smaller datasets is correspondingly greater. The GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) is just one such project among a larger group seeking to aggregate the smaller, focused, and disparate sources of information generated for the work of science. GBIF is simultaneously an effort to coordinate and aggregate digital species occurrence data and digitize natural history collections into a single global-scale resource for biodiversity work. The basis for this paper is a critical study of the GBIF database and data portal as a socio-technical system.ye

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

The surface of iron molybdate catalysts used for the selective oxidation of methanol

The oxidation of methanol to formaldehyde is a major chemical process carried out catalytically and iron molybdate is one of the major catalysts for this process. In this paper we explore the nature of the active and selective surfaces of iron molybdate catalysts and show that the effective catalysts comprise molybdenum rich surfaces. We conclude that it is therefore important to maximise the surface area of these active catalysts and to this end we have studied catalysts made using a new physical grinding method with oxalic acid. For super-stoichiometric materials (Fe:Mo = 1:2.2) the reaction data show that physical mixing produces effective catalysts, possibly offering an improvement over the conventional co-precipitation method

Extending African Knowledge Infrastructures: Sharing, Creating, Maintaining

World Bank, Knowledge for Development ProgramPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61201/1/Jackson et al, Extending African Knowledge Infrastructures (March 2008).pd