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)