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the feeling that "I am the only one." People often have a picture that somehow their problems are unique: they believe that other "real" sciences do not have the same set of makeshift compromises and work-arounds. |
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It is important in the development and implementation of classifications (and many related fields such as the development and deployment of standards or archives) that we get out of the loop of trying to emulate a distant perfection that on closer analysis turns out to be just as messy as our own efforts. The importance lies in a fundamental rethinking of the nature of information systems. We need to recognize that all information systems are necessarily suffused with ethical and political values, modulated by local administrative procedures. These systems are active creators of categories in the world as well as simulators of existing categories. Remembering this, we keep open and can explore spaces for change and flexibility that are otherwise lost forever. |
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Such politics are common to most systems employing formal representations. Rogers Hall, in his studies of algebra problem solving by both children and professional math teachers, talks about the shame that children feel about their unorthodox methods for arriving at solutions (1990). Often using innovative techniques such as imaginary devices, but not traditional formulaic means, they achieved the right answer the wrong way. One child called this "the dirt way." A grown-up version of the dirt way is related by the example given earlier of the "good organizational reasons for bad organizational records" (Bitner and Garfinkel 1967). There are good organizational reasons for working around formal systems; these adaptations are necessarily local. What is global is the need for them. |
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In this book we have attempted to develop tools for maintaining these open spaces. Michel Serres has best expressed the fundamental ethical and political importance of this task. He has argued that the sciences are very good at what they do: the task of the philosopher is to keep open and explore the spaces that otherwise would be left dark and unvisited because of their very success, since new forms of knowledge might arise out of these spaces. Similarly, we need to consistently explore what is left dark by our current classifications ("other" categories) and design classification systems that do not foreclose on rearrangements suggested by new forms of social and natural knowledge. |
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There are many barriers to this exploration. Not least among them is the barrier of boredom. Delving into someone else's infrastructure has about the entertainment value of reading the yellow pages of the |
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