Values in Design Day 4: G Bowker on infrastructure

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Infrastructure and values


clock of the long now

infrastructure exists in a long now and moves very slowly

the world of information is highly messy

...and the cleanup won't be easy
scientists attempt to reclassify all plants?!
huge arguments btw scientists, nursery owners, seed makers
local variations hold particular values

the chimera of total recall

* there are infinite ways to describe objects
* the ways we choose to describe object will reflect beliefs and values
* a version of Bertram Russell's Spinoza development: to know one fact about the world is to know all facts about the world


the revolution before print: when we came to believe in written documents over witnesses
phantoms of remembrance (Patrick Geary)

* subtle shift in France - family accounts went out of women's stories in households and into written records in male-inhabited monasteries
* massive social changes accompany changes in technology


from memory to written records (Michael Clanchie)

* Clanchie: 2nd edition - spread of literacy tied to totalitarian state
* yet scholars tell history of literacy, so that story remains hidden


ann blair - organization of encyclopedia in late 18th century
infinite ribbons of paper

19th cen: the tree form of classification emerges

* but you have to do a lot of work to make the world look like that
* the current "tree of life" doesn't look much like a tree, does it?
* doesn't help us deal with viruses, which jump from "branch to branch" but is a powerful way of working

the new colonialism information about species diversity is concentrated in places far from the actual sites of diversity

famine early-warning system

* USAID contracts for objective measure of vegetation index as indicator of famine
* but: weeds look like edible vegetation
* but: assumed that locals will lie
* it appears to be benign, but is taking control of representation of environment and moving it into satellite


aboriginal fire management of landscape
not listening to other ways of knowing

implosive device: information implodes into an artifact and layers in various ways

nursing classification

* in 1980s, organized by quality-of-life outcomes
* but nurses need to make their activities recognizable by hospital administrators so that it can be used to get more funding/positions
* so, consensus classification of nursing work
* this works well for discrete actions
* less obvious for ongoing processes (ie, spiritual support)
* but the details are, well, concocted
* fighting on two fronts: wanting representation in system, but also fight about whether representational system itself is not a good idea


datamining
huge political implications

gis

* tangier watershed map
* track caribou over a season and use it to arrange leisure patterns
* but what about climate change? won't the migration patterns change?
* a typical year is not the only year
* no environmental impact statement
* parameters chosen to tell a specific story about being able to satisfy everyone's needs


very difficult to reveal parameters that can be jiggled, and to give people a voice in the jiggling

education often just acculturates people into the existing models

imperative that citizens and information specialists are highly sensitive to political-cultural features of these systems

Helen N: relationship between infrastructure and classification?

Geof B: infrastructure is not classification - classification is a "perspicuous site" within infrastructure for seeing how political and social agendas get folded into infrastructure and become hard to see - it's an element of infrastructure

Jill C: Is infrastructure a framework or is it material?

GB: Socioprofessional Categories who gets classified as what - classification becomes truer as it is inscribed into the world through bureaucracy

Ingrid E: Why does cyberinfrastructure have a special name? Is it something different from infrastructure?

GB: Different names. Europeans have e-science. Dan Atkins' report. Diff from "normal" infrastructure because it went from fiber optics to middleware to applications to social organization. NSF now builds infrastructure in ways that it did not originally do. So now "cyberinfrastructure" is seen as part of scientific effectiveness. Ingrid E: What does a piece of cyberinfrastructure look like?

GB: Geom, single db from separate disciplines - data interchange. Or maybe distance use of shake tables for earthquake simulation IE: so are big collaborative systems infrastructure?

GB: top-down push

Suzi I: Ruzena Bajczy's report. A lot of building of things, but not a lot of use. Trying to embed a vision about the potential for future work. Intense computation. Ex: supercomputers. But this is a category that has grown organically [in the imagination of the NSF over 40 years]

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