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1997). If both people and information objects inhabit multiple contexts and a central goal of information systems is to transmit information across contexts, then a representation is a kind of pathway that includes everything populating those contexts. This includes people, things-objects, previous representations, and information about its own structure. The major requirements for such an ecological understanding of the path of re-representation are thus: |
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1. How objects can inhabit multiple contexts at once, and have both local and shared meaning. |
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2. How people, who live in one community and draw their meanings from people and objects situated there, may communicate with those inhabiting another. |
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3. How relationships form between (1) and (2) abovehow can we model the information ecology of people and things across multiple communities? |
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4. What range of solutions to these three questions is possible and what moral and political consequences attend each of them? |
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Standardization has been one of the common solutions to this class of problems.
48 If interfaces and formats are standard across contexts, then at least the first three questions become clear, and the fourth seems to become moot. But we know from a long and gory history of attempts to standardize information systems that standards do not remain standard for very long, and that one person's standard is another's confusion and mess (Gasser 1986, Star 1991b). We need a richer vocabulary than that of standardization or formalization with which to characterize the heterogeneity and the processual nature of information ecologies. |
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Boundary Objects and Communities of Practice |
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The class of questions posed by the slippage between classifications and standards on the one hand, and the contingencies of practice on the other, form core problematics both in the sociology of science and in studies of use and design in information science. A rich body of work has grown up in both fields that documents the clever ways people organize and reorganize when the local circumstances of their activities do not match the prescribed categories or standards (see Gasser 1986, Kling and Scacchi 1982, Lave 1988, Sacks 1975, Star 1983). Making |
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