Our lives are henged round with systems of classification, limned by standard formats, prescriptions, and objects... To classify is human. (1)These standards and classifications, however imbricated in our lives, are ordinarily invisible... (2)
...the pragmatics of the invisible forces of categories and standards in the modern built world... (5)
The categories represented on our desktops and in our medicine cabinets are fairly ad hoc and individual... everyone uses and creates them in some form, and they are (increasingly) important in organizing computer-based work... (6)
We rub these ad hoc classifications against an increasingly elaborate large-scale system of formal categories and standards... If we are to understand larger scale classifications, we also need to understand how desktop classifications link up with those that are formal, standardized, and widespread. (6-7)
Any information systems design that neglects use and user semantics is bound for trouble down the line --it will become either oppressive or irrelevant (7)
As we know from studies of work of all sorts, people do not do the ideal job, but the doable job. When faced with too many alternatives and too much information, they satisfice. (24)
[we may begin with] a lowest level of convenience classification (25) [and may need eventually to reorganize into] a high-level semantic one (25)
[a] struggle with uncertainty, ambiguity, standardization, and the practicalities of data quality (26)
a rich set of negotiated compromises ranging from epistemology to data entry that are both available and transparent to communities of users (34)
A systems approach might see the proliferation of both standards and classifications as purely a matter of integration --almost like a gigantic web of interoperability. They are layered, tangled, textured; they interact to form an ecology as well as a flat set of compatibilities... (38)
We are constantly revising our knowledge of the past in light of new developments in the present (40)
When we ask historical questions about the deeply and heterogeneously structured space of classification systems and standards, we are dealing with a four-dimensional archaeology. The systems move in space, time, and process. Some of the archaeological structures we uncover are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying. They are not consistent. (42)
...large-scale information systems... are always heterogeneous. Their ecology encompasses the formal and the informal, and the arrangements that are made to meet the needs of heterogeneous communities --some cooperative and some coercive. (286)
...categories are historically situated artifacts and, like all artifacts, are learned as part of membership in communities of practice (287)
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... to be perceived, information must reside in more than one context... Silence makes musical notes perceivable; conversation is understood as a contrast of contexts, speaker and hearer, words, breaks and breaths. In turn, in order to be meaningful, these contexts of information must be relinked through some sort of judgement of equivalence or comparability... (290-291)
...people as active interpreters of information who themselves inhabit multiple contexts of use and practice (291)
A community of practice... is, to put it simply, a set of relations among people doing things together (Becker 1986). The activities with their stuff, their routines, and exceptions are what constitute the community structure. Newcomers to the community learn by becoming "sort of" members... the process of "legitimate peripheral participation" (294)
The act of classification is of its nature infrastructural, which means to say that it is both organizational and informational, always embedded in practice. (320)