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)