/classifications

We would hate to have to assign a Dewey classification number to this book, which straddles sociology, anthropology, history and information systems, and design. Our modest hope is that it will not find its way onto the fantasy shelves

Where do categories come from? How do they span the boundaries of the communities that use them?

they are ubiquitous and infrastructural, continually remade and refreshed

One cannot directly see relations such as membership, learning, ignoring, or categorizing. They are names we give to patterns and indicators. If someone is comfortable with the things and language used by a group of others, we say that he or she is a member of that group. In this sense, categories—our own and those of others—come from action and in turn from relationships

classification systems as historical and political artifacts very much as part of modern Western bureaucracy

Assigning things, people, or their actions to categories is a ubiquitous part of work in the modern, bureaucratic state. Categories in this sense arise from work and from other kinds of organized activity, including the conflicts over meaning

how the various kinds of classification we have discussed knit together to form the texture of a social space. We move from classifying and boundary objects to categorical work and boundary infrastructures

The work of attaching things to categories, and the ways in which those categories are ordered into systems, is often overlooked (except by theorists of language such as Harvey Sacks 1975, 1992

large-scale information systems,, communicate across contexts,,heterogenous,,their ecology encompasses the formal and the informal

people-membership, things-naturalisation of things by communities of practise

Everyone is part of multiple communities of practice,, Both people's memberships and the naturalization of objects are multiple

categorical work->"doing being ordinary" (1975) or what Strauss pointed to as "continual permutations of action" (1993)

In the simplest seeming action, is embedded our complex knowledge of situations. These situations involve multiple memberships and how objects are used differently across communities. Many of these choices become standardized and built into the environment around us

the institutionalization of categorical work across multiple communities of practice, over time, produces the structures of our lives, from clothing to houses

What Sort of Thing Is a Category?

In so far as the coding scheme establishes an orientation toward the world, it constitutes a structure of intentionality whose proper locus is not the isolated, Cartesian mind, but a much larger organizational system, one that is characteristically mediated through mundane bureaucratic documents such as forms. (Goodwin 1996, 65)

The Pragmatist turn, like the activity theoretical turn taken by Cole and others, emphasizes the ways in which things perceived as real may mediate action (Star 1996)

Information Systems Across Contexts

At its most abstract, the design and use of information systems involves linking experience gained in one time and place with that gained in another, via representations of some sort

Even seemingly simple replication and transmission of information from one place to another involves encoding and decoding as time and place shift. Thus the context of information shifts in spite of its continuities; and this shift in context imparts heterogeneity to the information itself. Classifications are a very common sort of representation used for this purpose

Formal classification systems are, in part, an attempt to regularize the movement of information from one context to another; to provide a means of access to information across time and space.

One of the interesting features of communication is that, broadly speaking, to be perceived, information must reside in more than one context.

information is only information when there are multiple interpretations. One person's noise may be another's signal .What becomes problematic under these circumstances is the relationships among people and things, or objects, the relationships that create representations, not just noise.

We know what something is by contrast with what it is not.