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A historical process of development of many tools, arranged for a wide variety of users, and made to work in concert. |
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A practical match among routines of work practice, technology, and wider scale organizational and technical resources. |
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A rich set of negotiated compromises ranging from epistemology to data entry that are both available and transparent to communities of users. |
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A negotiated order in which all of the above, recursively, can function together. |
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Table 1.1 shows a more elaborate definition of infrastructure, using Star and Ruhleder (1996), who emphasize that one person's infrastructure may be another's barrier. |
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This chapter offers four themes, methodological points of departure for the analysis of these complex relationships. Each theme operates as a gestalt switchit comes in the form of an infrastructural inversion (Bowker 1994). This inversion is a struggle against the tendency of infrastructure to disappear (except when breaking down). It means learning to look closely at technologies and arrangements that, by design and by habit, tend to fade into the woodwork (sometimes literally!). |
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Infrastructural inversion means recognizing the depths of interdependence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production
8 on the other. It foregrounds these normally invisible Lilliputian threads and furthermore gives them causal prominence in many areas usually attributed to heroic actors, social movements, or cultural mores. The inversion is similar to the argument made by Becker (1982) in his book Art Worlds. Most history and social analysis of art has neglected the details of infrastructure within which communities of artistic practice emerge. Becker's inversion examines the conventions and constraints of the material artistic infrastructure and its ramifications. For example, the convention of musical concerts lasting about three hours ramifies throughout the producing organization. Parking attendants, unions, ticket takers, and theater rentals are arranged in cascading dependence on this interval of time. An eight-hour musical piece, which is occasionally written, means rearranging all of these expectations, which in turn is so expensive that such productions are rare. Or paintings are about the size, usually, that will hang comfortably on a wall. They are also the size that fits rolls of canvas, the skills of framers, |
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