Experimenting with the Archive: STS-ers As Analysts and Co-constructors of Databases and Other Archival Forms

This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the concep-tual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’ ’ (following Derrida’s Archive Fever 1998/1995 and Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences 2005) as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inven-tory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’ ’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are cur-rently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’ ’ toward expo-sure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing th