Slouching toward Infrastructure

Susan Leigh Star
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois

Sociology of Science and Understanding Practice

Sociology of science have drawn our attention to the rich and interesting mess that occurs backstage in the doing of science. Some of the elements of this mess include serendipity; unforeseen aspects of timing and coordination; the physical constraints of things and materials, including animals and tools; and the informal, backstage processes of communication and argumentation that inform all organizational life (Clarke and Fujimura, 1992; Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Star, 1991, 1995). Ignoring the messy side of science means (and did mean, for many years) that its public face was overly logical, a bit bloodless, and idealized. It also carries a good deal of shame when one doesn't live up to the legends -- as of course, no one never does.

Not in a spirit of muckraking (although some of the early work in science studies had titles such as "Science Off the Pedestal"), but in a spirit of discovery, restoring the backstage to the understanding of scientific practice has enriched how we see science as a form of practice. It's not that the logic isn't there -- it is -- or the real thrill of discovery is false -- it isn't -- but rather, that the whole process is much more interestingly complex, and human, than we first thought.

How can we turn these insights toward digital libraries? What rich messes await us as we link ever more electronic informatic sources together? What analytical tools will be most useful in exploring them? In this short position paper I would like to suggest a focus that to some degree looks "backwards" through the world wide web, and into people's offices, desktops and filing cabinets.

Ethnoclassification and the Sociology of Classification

One of the research groups with which I am involved at Illinois, the Illinois Research Group on Classification, has conducted a number of studies of the history and sociology of medical classification. We have looked at formal classification systems such as the International Classification of Diseases and the Nursing Intervention classification, and examined the processes of negotiation by which differing approaches to disease and to medical work are resolved into a single category scheme (Bowker and Star, 1994; Bowker, Timmermans and Star, 1995). We know from this research that the tensions and tradeoffs involved in classifying are never fully resolved. Ambiguities, local, moral, scientific and ethical differences are always a part of any workable scheme. Furthermore, idiosyncrasies and workarounds in encoding practices make "data quality" extraordinarily elusive from the point of view of control; any coding scheme is only as good as the work of the coders, and in many instances in medical classification, the coding work is neither valued nor monitored. (We know all too little about this aspect, by the way.) Nonetheless, in spite of these obstacles, at a large scale, these systems have become relatively stable, and are an important part of medical infrastructure. At least in part, they become stable in their very tolerance for ambiguity and for local tailoring of classifcatory needs.

The equivalent of coding work in digital libraries resides in the hands of readers who take the classification schemes (in various forms) of materials and adapt them. These schemes come from librarians, programmers, and other information intermediaries, as well as from other readers, often including oneself in the form of bibliographies, links and notes made at an earlier date.

The messy part comes in the seemingly innocuous verbs "taking and adapting." We know that navigating the web/digital library and information retrieval is an active selective process. It is now paired with the ability to download, filter and select -- in short, to begin to make a customized library for oneself. These materials are an interestingly messy combination of paper and electronic media; they are also a combination of pointers, abstracts, and documents. Whatever I pull onto my desktop, or navigate through from my link to the web, at this point as a reader, then, begins to weave in with my desk itself, my office, my filing cabinets, and all the rest of what Kling and Scacchi called "the web of computing" (1982).

The difficult part of tracing this web backwards through the net is its distribution in space, of course. If we want to understand how people are using the web, which includes the mess and not just the clean electronic part, we need to go out into some offices and understand more about the ecology of their workplaces. One way to do this is through an understanding of how readers are classifying their local work spaces and materials, down to the level of the filing cabinet, but also at the level of the computer desktop, web browsers, and group-level software. Matching these schemes with the larger, more formal classification schemes is something we all do and have done almost routinely (how do you file your reprints? do you have different stacks for "must read" and "maybe someday"? for "I'll use this in teaching" and "I'm just keeping this because I feel too guilty to throw it away?"). Treating this as a topic for analysis will be one strong link between sociology of science and work, on the one hand, to digital libraries on the other.

The social science team of our digital library project, Designing the Interface, has begun to address some of these issues in focus groups and observations of current library use by engineers and scientists (http://anshar.grainger.uiuc.edu/dlisoc/home_page.html). During the coming year, we will be doing more work with research groups in their work settings and offices.

References

Bowker, Geoffrey and Susan Leigh Star. 1994. "Knowledge and Infrastructure in International Information Management: Problems of Classification and Coding" Pp. 187-213 in L. Bud, ed. Information Acumen: the Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business. London: Routledge.

Bowker, Geoffrey, Stefan Timmermans and Susan Leigh Star. "Infrastructure and Organizational Transformation: Classifying Nurses' Work," Proceedings IFIP WG8.2 Conference: Information Technology and Changes in Organizational Work. Cambridge, England. IFIPS, December 1995.

Clarke, Adele E. and Joan H. Fujimura, eds. The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992a

Kling, R. and W. Scacchi. 1982. "The Web of Computing: Computing Technology as Social Organization."Advances in Computers 21: 3-78.

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life. Beverly Hills: SAGE. Neumann, Laura J. and Susan Leigh Star. 1995. "Object Worlds and Shifting Infrastructure: Building a Digital Library for Engineers," Paper given at the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) Meetings, Charlottesville, VA.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1991. "Invisible Work and Silenced Dialogues in Representing Knowledge" Pp. 81-92 in Women, Work and Computerization.: Understanding and Overcoming Bias in Work and Education. Ed. I.V. Eriksson, B.A. Kitchenham, and K.G. Tijdens. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1991.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1995. "The Politics of Formal Representations: Wizards, Gurus and Organizational Complexity," Pp. 88-118 in Susan Leigh

Star, Editor. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.

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