Class members are invited to contribute links and other information (to me by email). Please format your message in HTML. Some of the best messages are given below:
To which I replied:
If your point is that this isnt necessarily purely
hierarchical, then i agree with you; please mention this in class next time.
Also please look at the lecture notes to see what the main points are.
I just read this article on the Web (http://nt.excite.com/news/r/981015/17/odd-keyboard) and it made me think of our discussions in class and how technology can often do more worse than good. I hope you find the article as humorous as I did. Perhaps this is a good example of terrible user interface design?
PARIS (Reuters) - Electronic trading may be cheap, but leaning on the keyboard can be costly. A mystery plunge in the value of French 10-year bond futures on July 23 was triggered by a bank trader at Salomon Brothers in London who accidentally and repeatedly hit the "Instant Sell" button, investigators said Thursday. A wave of 145 separate sell orders sent the price diving on electronic screens. "The disputed trades arose as a result of the prolonged, unintentional and inadvertent operation of the 'Instant Sell' key," said an investigation by computer software firm Cap Gemini and security group Kroll Associates. Salomon Brothers declined to comment on any losses.See you in class on Wednesday,
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 10:21:27 -0800 (PST) To: program@helix.ucsd.edu Subject: Science Studies Colloquium, Monday, Nov. 2--Adrian Johns This Monday, November 2, 1998, UCSD Science Studies Colloquium presents "Transmuting the Self: The Power of Reading and the Practice of Magic, 1550-1750" featuring ADRIAN JOHNS UC San Diego Department of Sociology 4:00pm-6:00pm H&SS Room 3009 for additional info, contact the Science Studies office (see below)
Prof. Goguen, I know you're a fan of Amazon (me, too!), so heres a link... Amazon.com: Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226253252/qid%3D909982774/002-0788102-8076053 This copy is interesting because it has a forward by Thomas Kuhn, in which he makes a (suspiciously?) explicit denial of having been significantly influenced by this book, although he does admit to have read it before publishing _The Structure of a Scientific Revolution_. -K
Representation and Erasure: Classification and Organizational Memory Geoffrey C. Bowker Associate Professor Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana WHEN: Monday, November 16, 1998 WHERE: Media Center/Communication Building The Herbert I. Schiller Room 201 TIME: 12:30-2:00pm Formal classification systems are a large part of organizational communication, organizational memory, and of the infrastructure for knowledge work. Building on earlier work on the development of knowledge infrastructures (Bowker, 1994), this paper analyzes classifications of nursing work, viruses and plants in order to explore these social and organizational features of classification systems. The argument is made that classification systems provide means of storing both domain information and information about organizational work. In particular, they represent dynamic compromises between different groups within and between organizations. At times, these compromises mean that some voices are silenced and others privileged within formal classifications. The paper looks at the ecology of forgetting and remembering within the classification systems discussed, arguing that what is forgotten (and how the forgetting is done) can be just as important to the organization as what is remembered (Bowker, 1997). Finally, taking the example of the field of biodiversity information, some implications are drawn for the development of large scale distributed information systems. Bowker, 1994. Geoffrey C. Bowker, Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bowker, 1997. Lest We Remember: Organizational Forgetting and the Production of Knowledge, in Accounting, Management and Information Technology, 7 (3) 1997: 113-138.
A Good Infrastructure is Hard to Find: The Design and Politics of Large Scale Knowledge Systems S. Leigh Star Professor Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana WHEN: Wednesday, November 18, 1998 WHERE: Media Center/Communication Building The Herbert I. Schiller Room 201 TIME: 12:30-2:00pm In the early days of science studies, detailed empirical studies led researchers to focus on processes of knowledge discovery and scientific practice. Some of the important foci included the use of tools, the standardization of research materials, and an analysis of how groups with divergent persepctives cooperate. For the latter, my model of `boundary objects' provided an model of cooperation without consensus (Star and Griesemer, 1989). In recent years, the infrastructural aspects of these questions have come to the fore. How do the relatively invisible aspects of knowledge work (such as classifications, standards, specficiations, and forms) subtend the work of science and technology? How does infrastructure mediate distributed knowledge? This talk gives an overview of the issues as they have developed from my ethnographic and historical work on life scientists, medicine, South African apartheid, and with systems developers (Bowker and Star, in press). There are often inequities or gaps in communication about the design or use of infrastructure. These `quiet politics of voice,' while they are crucial for social justice, too rarely come to the level of public policy (Star and Strauss, 1999). Thus, the analysis of infrastructure represents a fertile domain for the investigation of the impact of information technology on everyday life. References: Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. In press. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, Institutional Ecology, Translations, and Coherence: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeleys Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939, Social Studies of Science, 19:387-420 (1989) Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss. 1999. Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 8:9-30