I work in the Center for Science, Technology and Society (CSTS) at Santa Clara University. Our mission at CSTS is to research and promote the use of science and technology for the common good.

My main current research interests are in the field of classification and standardization: in particular asking how these play into the development of scientific cyberinfrastructure. My recent Memory Practices in the Sciences looks at information infrstructures and storytelling in a science over the past two hundred years. It looks at geology in the 1830s, cybernetics in the 1950s and environmental sciences today - weaving together their information infrastructure and the stories that they tell about their objects. My next book after that - How to Read Databases - is coming slowly along.

My work on information infrastructure involves looking at shifting classification systems in medicine, distributed collaborative work practices in environmental science, data sharing practices and biodiversity informatics. My 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. Here is an interview with me about classification and infrastructure. Here is a paper written with Marc Berg on medical records; and here is one written with Leigh Star on classification, standards and actor-network theory. Here is a more complete set of papers. My main current project is on Interoperability in all its forms. The main site is best for papers and such, but there is an interoperable pdf file describing some of the work and an operable set of nuggets on this site.

My book on information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, Science on the Run, is to be found in quality bookshops in airports everywhere; my book with Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences was published by MIT Press in October, 1999 and is available at your neighbourhood online bookseller. A paperback version came out in September 2000. I am working right now (even as you are reading this) 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.

And here is my cat, or at least one of them - and that was then, you should see her now... .