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Thinking Infrastructures (Hardcover)
Martin Kornberger, Geoffrey C Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, …
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R3,673
Discovery Miles 36 730
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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This volume introduces the notion of Thinking Infrastructures to
explore a broad range of phenomena that structure attention, shape
decision-making, and guide cognition: Thinking Infrastructures
configure entities (via tracing, tagging), organise knowledge (via
search engines), sort things out (via rankings and ratings), govern
markets (via calculative practices, including algorithms), and
configure preferences (via valuations such as recommender systems).
Thus, Thinking Infrastructures, we collectively claim in this
volume, inform and shape distributed and embodied cognition,
including collective reasoning, structuring of attention and
orchestration of decision-making.
A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can
shape both worldviews and social interactions. What do a
seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include
"fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of
South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or
black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in
common? All are examples of classification-the scaffolding of
information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C.
Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and
standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style,
they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the
International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions
Classification, race classification under apartheid in South
Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The
authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which
classification orders human interaction. They examine how
categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change
this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of
classification as part of the built information environment. Much
as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning
decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of
classification design to understand how decisions have been made.
Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and
category valorizes some point of view and silences another.
Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs
are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others.
How these choices are made and how we think about that process are
at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an
important empirical source for understanding the building of
information infrastructures.
The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored
through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and
colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954-2010) was one of the most
influential science studies scholars of the last several decades.
In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering
science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as
the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark
work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed the
social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in
classification systems. Star's most celebrated concept was the
notion of boundary objects: representational forms-things or
theories-that can be shared between different communities, with
each holding its own understanding of the representation.
Unfortunately, Leigh was unable to complete a work on the poetics
of infrastructure that further developed the full range of her
work. This volume collects articles by Star that set out some of
her thinking on boundary objects, marginality, and infrastructure,
together with essays by friends and colleagues from a range of
disciplines-from philosophy of science to organization science-that
testify to the wide-ranging influence of Star's work. Contributors
Ellen Balka, Eevi E. Beck, Dick Boland, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Janet
Ceja Alcala, Adele E. Clarke, Les Gasser, James R. Griesemer, Gail
Hornstein, John Leslie King, Cheris Kramarae, Maria Puig de la
Bellacasa, Karen Ruhleder, Kjeld Schmidt, Brian Cantwell Smith,
Susan Leigh Star, Anselm L. Strauss, Jane Summerton, Stefan
Timmermans, Helen Verran, Nina Wakeford, Jutta Weber
Winner, 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize given by the Society for Social
Studies of Science (4S). and Awarded "Best Information Book 2006"
by the American Society for Information Science and Technology
(ASIS&T). The way we record knowledge, and the web of
technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it,
inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold
knowledge about the past--in handwritten manuscripts, in printed
books, in file folders, in databases--shape the kind of stories we
tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the
relation of our information infrastructures to our information,
Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years,
information technology has converged with the nature and production
of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social
and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for
science--the making of infrastructures--and the variety of ways we
continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past. At a time when
memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds
us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In
"Memory Practices in the Sciences" he looks at three "memory
epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries
and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of
scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science,
geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single
time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different
way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues,
packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to
permit traffic between the social andnatural worlds. Today's
sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way
that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools
of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto
nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.
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