The 2003 Lazerow Lecture
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF SILENCE IN INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURES
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan "Leigh" StarFriday, May 30th
3:30pm
Mary Gates Hall, Rm 389 (The Auditorium)
Drawing on analyses of the databasing of indigenous knowledge, biodiversity, chronic pain, and anomalies, the paper argues that there are systematic features of the silences occasioned by information infrastructures. These silences render ways of reading the complex topographies of silence. We argue that the "others" of information infrastructures - silences and forgetting - are central to their construction and use. Here we develop further arguments laid out in our book *Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences* about the design of ethical information infrastructures.
Processing large amounts of data electronically did not begin with the World Wide Web. Since the early days of computers, and certainly with the development of statistical software, computers have been tasked with finding correlations, structural similarities, duplications in lists, analysis of variance, and many other things not otherwise visible to the proverbial "naked eye." With the convergence of the World Wide Web, data mining techniques, and the federation of databases, this invisible world has broadened and taken on deeper shape. It is a commonplace in art that the white space is just as important as the filled-in space. The deeper the surveillance and description possibilities of any object, the more profound silences may become. In this sense, silences become the white space in electronic objects, and furthermore they may become objects in their own right. Similarly, invisibility may become an object: of surveillance, of claims (of presence or absence), of public display (with or without the permission of the invisible person, person managing an occasion, for census takers) or other now-durable white spaces. The "other" operates as a complex residual category; and with new analytic tools, may be used to limn the textures and spaces of a class of tools, specifically, classification systems. Silences present an unusual, almost oxymoronic challenge for the notions of cultural flow and cultural property so central to information science.
It is easy to see silence as of great concern to those concerned with privacy and surveillance -- the silences can be a way of seeing where someone is, or more precisely, where they are not. For clerical workers under surveillance, the absence of keyboard events means that someone is away from his computer. This paper explores this class of information events, and the challenges they pose to information designers.
Bio
Susan Leigh Star ("Leigh") is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is also faculty in the Department of Sociology and in the Science Studies Program there. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSD, Leigh was professor of Information Science at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For many years she has collaborated with computer and information scientists, with whom she has studied work, practice, organizations, scientific communities and their decisions, and the social/moral aspects of information infrastructure. She originally trained as an ethnographer and grounded theorist (with Anselm Strauss), and received her Ph.D. in Sociology of science and medicine from the University of California, San Francisco. She is a feminist activist, poet, and social theorist, in addition to being a troubler of categories.
With Geoffrey Bowker, her most recent book is Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT, 1999). Her previous work includes studies of a scientific museum, a community of biologists, the several communities intersecting to form modern brain research and surgery, and methodological pieces on the study of infrastructure from a social science perspective. Among her analytic contributions are the notion of "boundary object"; the development of Gregory Bateson's work on double binds as applied to infrastructure; and explication of the concept of "invisible work," especially as applied to the design of information systems.
Star's current work includes a monograph extending theories of boundary objects, Boundary Objects and the Poetics of Infrastructure (MIT Press, forthcoming). She is as well developing a new project on severe chronic pain and its manifestation in the body, bureaucracy, infrastructure, and categorization schemes. The study of chronic pain extends her interest in residual categories distributed throughout large-scale systems, as it is one of the quintessential phenomena to "fall between the cracks" of modern medicine.
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor in and Chair of the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. His Ph.D. is in History and Philosophy of Science at Melbourne University. He studies social and organizational aspects of the development of very large scale infrastructures. His first book (Science on the Run, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) discussed the development of information practices in the oil industry. He has recently completed with Leigh Star a book on the history and sociology of medical classifications (Sorting Things Out: Classification and Practice - published by MIT Press in September 1999). This book looks at the classification of nursing work, diseases, viruses and race. He has co-edited a volume on Computer Support Cooperative Work (Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, LEA Press, 1997). He has just finished the manuscript of a book, entitled Memory Practices in the Sciences about formal and informal recordkeeping in science over the past two hundred years. He is a member of an OECD working group on international data sharing in science (http://dataaccess.sdsc.edu/); and is on the Science Committee of the National Biological Information Infrastructure. He is on the steering committee of the University of California Digital Cultures project. More information can be found at his website: http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker.
Reception to follow...
Information on the ISI Samuel Lazerow Lecture Series: The distinguished Samuel Lazerow Lecture, an annual event, is sponsored by the ISI's Corporate Awards Program (http://www.isinet.com/). The Lecture Series was established by ISI in 1983, to honor the memory of Samuel Lazerow, who was an outstanding librarian, administrator, and pioneer in library automation.
For further information on this or any other iSchool sponsored event please contact Alisha LaPlante alishab@u.washington.edu or 206-221-6449