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is, in other words, the passive backdrop against which the historical drama is played out. Information infrastructures are constitutive of that backdrop; when they are foregrounded, and the historian's standard categories are rendered contingent, they become objects of historical examination. |
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To bring together this Janus face of infrastructure, we make a double kind of shift. This is the ''infrastructural inversion," discussed in chapter 1 (Bowker 1994). The inversion helps provide a framework within which one can consider the filiation among information processing practices and technologies across a range of arenas. This also generalizes the history told here of the ICD. The problems faced by the ICD and its solutions have as much in common with the history of the Dewey classification system in libraries and industry as they do with the history of medicine before the ICD. |
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To do historical justice to the development of information infrastructures, one must move among stories that historians traditionally tell of people and places and things and those stories that are generally left untold: of the woof and warp of the canvas on which historical dramas are painted.
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