|
|
|
|
|
|
|
interests. In this picture, the ICD is a passive list, molded by outside forces. The ICD can, on the other hand, be brought into center stage as one of the mechanisms developed this century for producing and defining the modern state. According to this position, it is no happenstance that a series of universal classifications emerged in the late nineteenth century (classifications of work, industrial equipment, criminal physiognomies, see Tort 1989). Rather, the development and maintenance of such classifications by increasingly ramified bureaucracies changed what it was to be a citizen of a given state. They provided fundamental tools for communication and control. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Finally, looking at the ICD and information processing, we saw that one could as well tell the history of medical classification internally from within the history of medicine as the story of the development of better and better classifications in tune with the development of medical knowledge. When we emphasize the infrastructure of classified medical knowledge associated with the ICD, we see a classic story of the development of computing infrastructure. Thus the ICD can be understood as one of many classification systems this century that have changed in tune with the development of computing technology: the storage and retrieval devices involved played a large part in shaping the nature and form of the classification system. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Given Star and Ruhleder's (1996) definition of infrastructures as being hybrid creations of work practice and information medium, such figure-ground switches are helpful historically. Working infrastructures like classification systems are deeply embedded both in practice and in technology. Their history cannot be told independently of the work practices that they constitute or the media in which they are inscribed. The work practices associated with the ICD link its history with of a set of classificatory practices defining the modern state and later the modern corporation. The media associated with the ICD link its history with a set of classificatory principles associated with a particular technological base developed for the management of distributed information. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The analysis of information infrastructures forces us to pay close attention to the unit of historical analysis. One might say that typically an historian seeks to examine the change in an historical entity over timea person as she or he gets older, a state as it goes to war, an idea as it is born, developed, and superseded. In these standard cases one assumesrightly or wronglythat what it is to be a person, a state, or an idea does not change in the course of the historical treatment. It |
|
|
|
|
|