Classifications, Standards, Information Infrastructure

1
Classifications, Standards, Information
Infrastructure
2
Classification and Social Reality

• Classification systems are the material force of
  the social fact
• Classification systems are part of the built
  information environment (information
  infrastructure)
• Invisible (yet order human interaction)

3
Classification and Social Reality

• Study of classification systems should focus on
• distribution of ambiguity
• how systems meet reality (biography
  limitations of systems)
• studies of work-arounds (how users change
  systems)
• information use based on knowledge produced by
  the systems
• tools for classification (desktop folders, file
  cabinets, documents)

4
Classification vs. Standards

• (Bowker Star, p. 13)
• When systems of sorting out social and material
  reality, of classifying the world become
  standardized we have standards
• Set of agreed-upon rules for the production of
  (textual or material) objects
• Standard spans more than one community of
  practice or site of activity (persists over time
  connects social worlds)

5
Standards

• Standards are used in making things work together
  over distance and heterogeneous metrics
• Standards are often enforced by legal bodies
  mandated by professional organizations,
  manufacturers organizations, state, etc.
• Standards that win may do so for a variety of
  reasons (build on existing base, have better
  marketing on the outset used by a community of
  gatekeepers who favor their use)
• Standards are inert difficult and expensive to
  change

6
Infrastructures

• Systems of classification (and of
  standardization) form a juncture of social
  organization, moral order, layers of technical
  integration
• Invisible, not transparent, as they scale up they
  become increasingly complex
• Methodology of building and use of these systems
  carefully designed

7
Infrastructures

• databases, standards, instruction manuals
  systems of classification (and of
  standardization)
• involved in knowledge production (tools,
  artefacts)
• reflect the politics of work (overlapping
  interests of communities of practice)
• definition (Bowker-Star, p. 35)
• infrastructural inversion (Bowker Star, p.
  34)
• design of large-scale information infrastructural
  systems (Bowker Star, p. 159-160)

8
Infrastructures

• A historical process of development of tools,
  arranged for a wide variety of users, and made to
  work in concert
• A practical match among routines of work
  practice, technology, and wider scale
  organizational and technical resources
• A rich set of negotiated compromises ranging from
  epistemology to data entry that are both
  available and transparent to communities of users
• A negotiated order in which all of the above,
  recursively, can function together

9
Infrastructure -def.

• Embeddedness
• Transparency
• Reach or scope
• Learned as part of membership
• Links with conventions of practice
• Embodiment of standards
• Built on an installed base
• Becomes visible upon breakdown
• Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once
  or globally

10
Infrastructural System Design

• Provide parallel or multiple-representational
  forms when faced with incompatible information or
  data structures among users or among those
  specifying the system (unitary categories of
  knowledge are futile)
• Strike a balance in coding of information (too
  few categories will result in information that is
  not useful too many categories will result in
  bias, randomness of those filling out the forms)

11
Infrastructural System design

• Imposed standards will produce work-arounds
  (informal responses to imposed standards include
  fitting, augmenting, and working around)
• Fit with existing organizational information
  processing tailor the complexity of the
  representation to organizational scale
• Match the structure of information system
  mediating among diverse participants with
  information needs that are as diverse (ICD
  repository normalizes forms fed by a widely
  distributed constituency)