Knowledge%20and%20Practice%20Information%20Infrastructures

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Knowledge and PracticeInformation
Infrastructures
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Knowledge and Practice

• Knowledge systems developed by communities of
  practice
• to enable coordination among multiple
  organizations (bureaucracies, professional groups
  operating within institutions) and movement of
  records created by organizations
• to enable movement of knowledge through time
  (remembering)
• Knowledge systems in the form of information
  infrastructures
• related to documentary practices, classification
  systems, institutional contexts (iron cage of
  bureaucracy)

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Knowledge and Practice

• STO gives examples and analyses of concrete
  social classifications that affect how
  individuals lives are shaped, shows link between
  society and institutions
• bureaucracies, classifications, forms shape
  information as it circulates in the knowledge
  system

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Knowledge and Practice

• information infrastructures for medical knowledge
  (medical classification systems tuberculosis,
  ICD)
• needs to be able to be abstract and uncover the
  underlying reality, therefore not contingent and
  historical
• tendency to present ways of knowing that are
  absolute, not focusing on process
• torques the biographies of individuals
• spatial only, temporal only

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Knowledge and Practice

• formal systems of knowledge representation and
  informal, experiential, empirical and situated
  experience are qualitatively different
• important to study the limitations of these
  systems of knowledge
• the warping factor for each (e.g., medical
  knowledge as it reshapes other kinds of
  experience of the patient)
• how hegemony meets information systems

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Knowledge and Practice

• classification systems reveal tensions between
  knowledge systems and experienced reality, and
  interests among communities of practice
• biography (Ch. 5 tuberculosis, Ch. 6 apartheid
  racial classification)
• work practice (Ch. 7 classification of nursing
  work, Ch. 8 organizational forgetting)

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Knowledge and Practice

• Why study classification of tuberculosis, ICD,
  racial classifications?
• Because it allows to explore the seamless web of
  science and society, of
• nature and knowledge, to an analysis of
  information infrastructure that acts
• as matrix for the web. The web itself is textured
  in ways by the available
• modes of information storage and transfer. In
  general, the information
• infrastructure holds certain kinds of knowledge
  and supports certain varieties
• of network we believe that it is a task of some
  urgency to analyze which kinds
• of knowledge and network.
• (Sorting Things Out, p. 193)

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Knowledge and Practice

• study of classification systems in their social
  context allows for
• understanding information systems as they shape
  individuals lives
• understanding information systems as powerful
  social forms encasing certain types of knowledge
  and privileging it over others (Ch. 9 boundary
  objects as means of communication across systems,
  naturalization, wildness)
• intervention in the construction of
  infrastructures as critics and as designers (Ch.
  10 Why Classifications Matter)