Sorting things out Bowker

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Sorting things out - Bowker Star
Eric Monteiro, NTNU and Univ. of
Oslo November 2000
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Contents

• idea relevance
• themes
• ICD9
• questions critique

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Why bother - its dull (I)

• not given (Foucault)
• human sense-making (Douglas)

belonging to the Emperor, stray dogs and
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
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Why bother - its dull (II)

• all around us
• modernization
• increased meshing/interconnection
• it matters
• prerequisite for control (Yates)
• globalization
• effective strategy of marginalization
• invisible
• politics

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An analogy
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The questions

• how
• who
• why
• alternatives

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Themes analytic methodological

• ubiquity
• materiality and texture
• multiple times, multiple voices
• design, politics by other means

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ICD 9 (I)

• WHO
• diseases that threahen public health
• Global
• Standardized death certificates
• 100 year history - many revisions

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Over time

• increased detail
• cross-referencing
• conservatism, dont discard cathegories
• other institutions, e.g. Insurance

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ICD 9 (II)

• still birth - when does life start?
• ethics
• Catholic vs. protestant

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ICD 9 (III)

• Old age
• not natural accidents
• a view from nowhere - developing countries?
• Few tropical diseases

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Pragmatics (I)

• Global vs. tailor-made
• for whom? (data accuracy)
• doctors
• statisticians
• epidemiologist
• industrial actors (insurance pharmaceuticals)
• ambiguity - productive!
• categories (too few/ loose info -- too
  many/extra work)

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Pragmatics (II) - principles

• Body part (topographical)
• arm, inside, head,.
• origin (etiological)
• genetic, viral, bacterial,
• operational
• responses to certain tests (ex. HIV)
• etical - political
• still birth

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Convergence

• Artefact and context co-evolve
• mutually co-construct/ constitute
• Ex. TB work/treatments so far
• Ex. broken legs ski-resorts
• Ex. Kodak popular photographing

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Does it scale up?

• Classification --gt categorical work
• natualized objects
• boundary object --gt boundary infrastructure
• multiple memberships in communities of practise
• distribution/juggling of meaning (members,
  objects)

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The challenge
The toughest problems in information
systems design are increasingly those concerned
with modeling cooperation across heterogenous
worlds, of modeling articulation work
and multiplicity (p. 308)
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Implications for design

• classification balancing
• retrivable voices
• sensitive to exclusion

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Critique/ questions

• As always, unclear wrt. Design
• no/ little process
• constructing cathegories
• implications/inscriptions of these
• BUT little USE of these
• talk about WORK but...