Product Description

What do a 17th-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath", "frighted" and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, coloured or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification - the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In "Sorting Things Out", Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, incuding the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of "invisibility" in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. "Sorting Things Out" has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #235934 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 389 pages

Customer Reviews

A good read for everyone,
For a classification nerd like me, this is a thoroughly engaging look at how the creation and implementiaton of classification schemes infiltrates and is affected by other social and human factors.

For the lay-reader, Sorting things out is a digestible, although sometimes overly worded introduction to the pernicious nature of categorising and dividing anything and a wake-up call to everyone to give more consideration to the segmentations we create and perpetuate on a daily basis and their wider effects.

Great for IA's - gives a wider view of the importance of labelling and structure and the behaviour of users and agents.

File under dull, turgid, tedious & missed opportunity
You can't expect every book to make worthy subjects fascinating (e.g. Freakonomics), but this collection of lengthy (so, so lengthy) descriptions of mostly medical classifications is as dull as they come.

Even for academia, the emphasis of description, the paucity of analysis and the complete absence of any practical guidance is disappointing.

OK it was written in 1999, but there is nothing about the emerging challenges of information classification on the Internet at a time when Yahoo! etc. were offering browsable taxonomies of web sites.

Excellent! Good reference!
It does provide the information what I need for classification. Excellent book!