Susan Leigh Star

The Ethnography of Infrastructure

This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. Infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs, and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior. Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.

The structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving

The paper argues that the development of distributed artificial intelligence should be based on a social metaphor, rather than a psychological one. The Turing Test should be replaced by the “Durkheim Test,” that is, systems should be tested with respect to their ability to meet community goals. Understanding community goals means analyzing the problem of due process in open systems. Due process means incorporating differing viewpoints for decision-making in a fair and flexible manner. It is the analog of the frame problem in artificial intelligence. From analyses of organizational problem solving in scientific communities, the paper derives the concept of boundary objects, and suggests that this concept would be an appropriate data structure for distributed artificial intelligence. Boundary objects are those objects that are plastic enough to be adaptable across multiple viewpoints, yet maintain continuity of identity. Four types of boundary object are identified: repositories, ideal types, terrain with coincident boundaries, and forms.

This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept

There are three components to boundary objects as outlined in the original 1989 article. Interpretive flexibility, the structure of informatic and work process needs and arrangements, and, finally, the dynamic between ill-structured and more tailored uses of the objects. Much of the use of the concept has concentrated on the aspect of interpretive flexibility and has often mistaken or conflated this flexibility with the process of tacking back-and-forth between the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the arrangements. Boundary objects are not useful at just any level of scale or without full consideration of the entire model. The article discusses these aspects of the architecture of boundary objects and includes a discussion of one of the ways that boundary objects appeared as a concept in earlier work done by Star. It concludes with methodological considerations about how to study the system of boundary objects and infrastructure.There are three components to boundary objects as outlined in the original 1989 article. Interpretive flexibility, the structure of informatic and work process needs and arrangements, and, finally, the dynamic between ill-structured and more tailored uses of the objects. Much of the use of the concept has concentrated on the aspect of interpretive flexibility and has often mistaken or conflated this flexibility with the process of tacking back-and-forth between the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the arrangements. Boundary objects are not useful at just any level of scale or without full consideration of the entire model. The article discusses these aspects of the architecture of boundary objects and includes a discussion of one of the ways that boundary objects appeared as a concept in earlier work done by Star. It concludes with methodological considerations about how to study the system of boundary objects and infrastructure.

Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology ofVisible and Invisible Work

No work is inherently either visible or invisible. We always “see” work through a selection of indicators: straining muscles, finished artifacts, a changed state of affairs. The indicators change with context, and that context becomes a negotiation about the relationship between visible and invisible work. With shifts in industrial practice these negotiations require longer chains of inference and representation, and may become solely abstract.This article provides a framework for analyzing invisible work in CSCW systems. We sample across a variety of kinds of work to enrich the understanding of how invisibility and visibility operate. Processes examined include creating a “non-person” in domestic work; disembedding background work; and going backstage. Understanding these processes may inform the design of CSCW systems and the development of related social theory.

Regions of the mind : brain research and the quest for scientific certainty

Acknowledgments Preface 1. Studying scientific work 2. The institutional contexts of localization research 3. Uncertainty clinical and basic research 4. Triangulating clinical and basic research 5. The debate about cerebral localization 6. The mind/brain problem: parallelism and localization 7. The legacy of localizationism Appendices Notes Indexes.

Steps towards an ecology of infrastructure: complex problems in design and access for large-scale collaborative systems

This paper analyzes the initial phases of a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user feedback and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual trade-offs. Using Batesons levels of learning, we characterize these as levels of infrastructural complexity which challenge both users and developers. Usage problems may result from different perceptions of this complexity in different organizational contexts.

Infrastructure and Organizational Transformation: Classifying Nurses’ Work

This paper describes an evolving classification system for understanding the nature of nursing work, the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) developed at the University of Iowa. We describe the balancing act inherent in maximizing three dimensions of the system: comparability, control and visibility. As part of a series of studies on the relationship between classification, infrastructure, work and knowledge, we link NIC with other classification systems such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and its role in organizational coordination. We analyze some of the features of evolving infrastructure, and its potential impact on organizations and practice.

Digital libraries: situating use in changing information infrastructure

How users meet infrastructure is a key practical, methodological challenge for digital library design. This article presents research conducted by the Social Science Team of the federally funded Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois. Data were collected from potential and actual users of the DLI testbed—containing the full text of journal articles—through focus groups, interviews and observations, usability testing, user registration and transaction logging, and user surveys. Basic results on nature and extent of testbed use are presented, followed by a discussion of three analytical foci relating to digital library use as a process of assemblage: document disaggregation and reaggregation; information convergence; and the manner in which users confront new genres and technical barriers in information systems. The article also highlights several important methodological and conceptual issues that frame research on social aspects of digital library use.

Conceptual foundations for the development of organizational decision support systems

It is noted that the effort to construct organizational decision support systems (ODSS) is new to the field of information systems but draws heavily on previous experience with decision support systems (DSS) and group decision support systems (GDSS). The conceptual foundations of this new venture are not well established, but the most logical approach to designing ODSS would be to simply scale-up GDSS technologies to deal with larger groups at the organizational level. However, a careful examination of the character of decision processes at the individual, group, and organizational level suggests that organizational decision processes differ significantly from group decision processes, and features of GDSS that are useful at the group level might well be dysfunctional at the organizational level. Simple scale-up is therefore not a recommended approach. Instead, a broader view of organizational decision processes as an open-system problem is presented, in which ODSS technologies might be constructed to facilitate two important, existing features of group decision making: the maintenance of articulated due process and the establishment of boundary objects.<<ETX>>

The trojan door: Organizations, work, and the “open black box”

The paper summarizes recent work on organizations, artificial intelligence systems, human-computer interaction, etc., which emphasizes thesituated, distributed, andfluid nature of social systems. This contrasts with the traditional way of writing and thinking about social systems which sees them as disembodied, ideal, formal notions of thought. The implications of this new view of systems for social actors, information, knowledge, and technology are discussed. The literature reviewed offers a new way of talking about systems and their practices.