Very large information systems embody values which are often invisible, embedded in layers of infrastructure. The `quiet politics' of information interchange protocols or how insurance data are encoded often have substantial impact on people's lives, yet are often inaccessible to public debate. In this project, we are analyzing two such infrastructural tools, seeking to understand their politics, values, and how they tie together infrastructure, work and knowledge.

We are examining the design, development and use of two classification systems: the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC). The ICD is about one hundred years old, originally begun in the heyday of vital statistics and the birth of international science in the late 19th century, and revised about every ten years since. It is currently administered by the World Health Organization and is used by and adapted widely for the collection of epidemiological data and encoding health information, including occupational and insurance needs. NIC is much younger, having its origins in a move to classify nursing work in the 1970s, and codified in the late 1980s. It has begun to be internationally adopted and is currently in use in several midwestern hospitals, as well as being a tool in nursing research and curriculum design. For comparative purposes and to increase the depth of the analysis, we will also look at similar developments in library and racial (including census) classification schemes.

Our analytic focus is on understanding how large-scale information infrastructures (both computerized and non-computerized) embed values and politics in a variety of settings. We are especially interested in routine, even boring aspects of information encoding, such as the degree of precision awarded to codes for particular conditions or procedures. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the psychiatric cousin of ICD, has received much attention from social scientists, ICD and NIC have not In part, this is because the DSM labels controversial social categories, such as naming homosexuality as an illness (in earlier incarnations or postnatal depression (in the current version). Yet important public and scientific consequences may come from less obvious classification decisions, and encode moral order in subtle fashions.

Our empirical material is drawn from several sources. For the ICD, we have collected archival material (notes and photocopies) from the WHO and United Nations Archives, Geneva,; secondary material such as WHO publications and USPHS documentation. For NIC, we have been conducting an ongoing ethnographic investigation with its designers and developers, nursing researchers at the University of Iowa. We have thus archived a body of interview and fieldnote transcripts, and as well have been following an electronic mail bulletin board for users. In this study, we are completing data collection, thoroughly analyzing the material we have in hand, and conducting systematic comparisons.

Our primary result will be a monograph presenting a model linking values, classification, infrastructure and scientific knowledge and practice. Papers out of the project to date can be found at http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~bowker/pubs.htm


NSF "NUGGETS"

"We do many things today that a few hundred years ago would have looked like magic". We all know versions of this banal assertion - we've probably all made it ourselves at some point or another. And if we don't understand a given technology it looks like magic: we are perpetually surprised by the mellifluous tones read off our favorite CDs by (we believe) a laser. Leigh Star notes that even engineers black box and think of technology `as if by magic' in their everyday practical dealings with machines. A common description of a good waiter or butler (one thinks of Jeeves in the Wodehouse stories) is that she clears a table `as if by magic'. Are these two kinds of magic or one or none?

Our project seeks to answer this question, which can be posed more prosaically as:

• What work do classifications and standards do? We look at what goes into making things work like magic: making them fit together so that we can buy a radio built by someone we have never met in Japan, plug it into a wall in Champaign and hear the world news from the BBC.
• Who does that work? We want to explore the fact that all this magic involves much work: there is a lot of hard labor in effortless ease. Such invisible work is often not only underpaid - it is severely underrepresented in theoretical literature. We look at where all the `missing work' that makes things look magical goes.
• What happens to the cases that don't fit? We want to draw attention to cases that don't fit easily into our created world of standards and classifications: the left handers in the world of right-handed magic, chronic disease sufferers in the world of allopathic acute medicine, the onion-hater in MacDonalds and so forth.