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available technology: the encyclopedia comes to mirror the affordances of its technological base. In this process, people naturalize the historically contingent structuring of information; they often begin to see it as inevitable. |
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Infrastructural routines as conceptual problems. No knowledge system exists in a vacuum, it must be rendered compatible with other systems.
18 The tricky, behind the scenes work of ensuring backward and sideways compatibility is not only technical work, it challenges the very integrity of any unifying scheme. Such work, however, is itself often classed as ''mere" maintenance and deemed unworthy of public, historical pride of place. |
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To understand the architecture of such schemes, then, we need to look at the traces they leave of their own history and constitution (as we did through reading the ICD). This chapter examines the historical intertwining of medium, message, routine, and data entry in the ICD. One of the challenges here is to understand how the drive for universal languages and databases is reconciled with the pragmatics of practice and the constraints of the installed base. True universality is necessarily always out of reach. At the same time, the vision of global data gathering and sharing is enormously powerful, and it needs to be understood in its own terms. This is one important context for the development and deployment of such systems as the ICD as tools. |
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During this century the information sciences have grappled with new ways of configuring, storing, and retrieving information. The rise of networked computing, and the extravagant advances in processing capacity have increased the pace and pressure of this struggle. We are clearly at a point today where we are witnessing the birth of an information technology as fundamentally new as was the printing press in its day (see Eisenstein 1979 for the latter). We do not take this as an unproblematic information revolution. Rather, by looking at the more sober, less glamorous aspects of this infrastructural transformation, we hope to discomfit some of the revolutionary hype (Bowker 1998). This chapter examines the historical background of the development of the ICD as information infrastructure. |
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As noted in chapter 1, there are too few theoretical tools available to the historian for grasping the development of a new information infrastructure. Infrastructure does more than make work easier, faster or, more efficient; it changes the very nature of what is understood by work. Such changes always span multiple disciplines, industries, and |
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