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human or nonhuman, structure or process, group or individual. It powerfully draws attention to the fact that the materiality of anything (action, idea, definition, hammer, gun, or school grade) is drawn from the consequences of its situation. |
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The Pragmatist turn, like the activity theoretical turn taken by Cole and others, emphasizes the ways in which things perceived as real may mediate action (Star 1996). If someone is taken to be a witch, and an elaborate technical apparatus with which to diagnose her or him as such is developed, then the reality of witchcraft obtains in the consequencesperhaps death at the stake. Classification systems are one form of technology, used in the sense Cole employs, linked together in elaborate informatic systems and enjoining deep consequences for those touched by them. |
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The following section discusses the problems of scaling up, from boundary objects and classifications systems on the one hand to a notion of boundary infrastructure. This analysis draws together the notions of multiplicity and the symbolic-material aspects of categories as artifacts discussed above. |
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Information Systems Across Contexts |
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At its most abstract, the design and use of information systems involves linking experience gained in one time and place with that gained in another, via representations of some sort. Even seemingly simple replication and transmission of information from one place to another involves encoding and decoding as time and place shift. Thus the context of information shifts in spite of its continuities; and this shift in context imparts heterogeneity to the information itself. Classifications are a very common sort of representation used for this purpose. 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. The ICD, for example, moves information across the globe, over decades, and across multiple conflicting medical belief and practice systems. |
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One of the interesting features of communication is that, broadly speaking, to be perceived, information must reside in more than one context. We know what something is by contrast with what it is not. 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 informa- |
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