Information Infrastructure and Ecologies of Rhetoric: Thoughts on Collin Gifford Brooke's Lingua Fracta

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Oct 042011

As back­ground read­ing for a book project, I have been work­ing through Lin­gua Fracta by Collin Gif­ford Brooke. I like this book alot because of its genre: it’s the type of the­o­ret­i­cal work I’ve been writ­ing recently.

One part in par­tic­u­lar has stood out as par­tic­u­larly use­ful so far: Brooke’s dis­cus­sion of rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies. Brooke describes a rhetor­i­cal ecol­ogy by way of the clas­si­cal rhetor­i­cal canons: inven­tion, arrange­ment, style, mem­ory, deliv­ery. An inven­tion ecol­ogy, for exam­ple, is “a per­sonal sen­si­tiv­ity to the con­di­tions under which inven­tion takes place in my own writ­ing” (44).

It’s his exam­ple of an inven­tional ecol­ogy that drew my attention:

I attend a cou­ple of con­fer­ences per year and each time, start­ing about halfway through the con­fer­ence and extend­ing to as long as a week fol­low­ing my return trip home, I am a par­tic­u­larly pro­duc­tive writer. I sus­pect that many peo­ple share this expe­ri­ence .… When I began blog­ging, I noticed a shift in my per­cep­tions of the world around me.… Over time, the sub­tle oblig­a­tion of the weblog has some­times encour­aged me to write when oth­er­wise I would not” (44).

Although Brooke is writ­ing largely about social con­ven­tions affect­ing the writ­ing process, I couldn’t help but think of a Howard Becker book (Art Worlds) in which he explores the infra­struc­ture of musi­cal con­certs. The typ­i­cal con­cert lasts about three hours and sys­tem­atic depen­den­cies like con­cert labor, park­ing space, and occu­pant spaces become hope­lessly entwined into that 3 hour time period. The odds of being able to run an eight-hour con­cert must work against a slew of pre­con­fig­ured and embed­ded con­ven­tions of prac­tice. The time of the con­cert, once estab­lished, lit­er­ally becomes infra­struc­tured into the social prac­tice of the con­cert. When these con­ven­tions become embed­ded within tech­ni­cal sys­tems, this infra­struc­tur­ing process becomes sig­nif­i­cantly more complex.

Mate­r­ial objects are built because of social con­ven­tion but then push back and solid­ify con­ven­tion (ANT the­o­rists will be yawn­ing at how rudi­men­tary that seems). Get­ting back to Brooke and his book, the thing I find inter­est­ing about rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies is the infra­struc­ture involved in each. Yes, to some extent rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies are dynamic, but they also con­sist of infra­struc­tured, mate­r­ial tech­nolo­gies. Just to begin think­ing about blog­ging, it seems that one part of the struc­tured ecol­ogy the HTML form field that is used in many con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems as a way to shut­tle text to the server. The inter­face pro­vides an easy way to write a ton of text, but it resists com­pos­ing with some­thing more like a mind map­ping piece of soft­ware. This is to say that it’s hard to doo­dle with bub­bles in a blog. I need to think a lit­tle bit more about this, but stan­dard­ized com­po­nents pro­vide resis­tance to writ­ing and rhetoric.

This is all just a long way of say­ing that I’m find­ing a lot I like about Brooke’s book. It’s smart, and I see some great places to add infra­struc­tural the­ory to his con­cep­tion of rhetoric.

Posted by NRJ at 12:41 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Bowker's "The History of Information Infrastructure"

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Jul 092011

Bowker, Geof­frey C. “The His­tory of Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­tures: The Case of the Inter­na­tional Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Dis­eases.” Infor­ma­tion Pro­cess­ing & Man­age­ment 32, no. 1 (Jan­u­ary 1996): 49–61.

This arti­cle is a lead up to a few chap­ters that ended up in Bowker and Star’s Sort­ing Things Out. I found my read­ing copy in a book called His­tor­i­cal Stud­ies in Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence.

There are sev­eral pay­offs for read­ing this arti­cle. One is that this is an early piece that shows how Bowker was think­ing about writ­ing his­to­ries of infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture. Because the arti­cle is in a bit of a pri­mor­dial state, read­ing it helps to see how Bowker was think­ing dur­ing some of his later work.

This arti­cle also describes sev­eral key terms and con­cepts that are enor­mously help­ful for ana­lyz­ing infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture: imbri­ca­tion, boot­strap­ping, figure/ground, and a short dis­cus­sion of infra­struc­tural inver­sion. “Imbri­ca­tion” is an ana­lytic con­cept that helps to ask­ing ques­tions about his­tor­i­cal data. A good exam­ple from my own work: I’m cur­rently work­ing back­wards through meth­ods of com­puter pro­gram­ming to see which pro­gram­ming con­cepts, clas­si­fi­ca­tions, and tech­niques are passed for­ward to new lan­guages and stan­dards. Com­puter lan­guages (unsur­pris­ingly) bor­row lots from the work that peo­ple have already done. Con­cerns, val­ues, and pol­i­tics of the past are passed for­ward with those concepts.

“Boot­strap­ping” is the idea that infra­struc­ture must already exist in order to exist. Another way to say this is that infra­struc­ture forms an impor­tant part of social con­text. To cre­ate an infra­struc­ture as part of social con­text, peo­ple must already be work­ing with the imag­i­nary con­cepts of that con­text. This becomes par­tic­u­larly messy as an infra­struc­ture is used across large spans of time and space, yet its orig­i­nal design is context-dependent and built with the knowl­edge of the cul­tures that insti­gated the project. So to boot­strap is to build the exist­ing assump­tions and pol­i­tics about what infra­struc­ture is use­ful for into infra­struc­ture while real­iz­ing that the design of infra­struc­ture will simul­ta­ne­ously build those assump­tions and pol­i­tics into other times and spaces as the infra­struc­ture is adopted else­where. An exam­ple might be use­ful here. Bowker’s arti­cle deals mostly with the Inter­na­tional Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Dis­eases (ICD), which has a rich clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem for cat­e­go­riz­ing death. These clas­si­fi­ca­tions reflect the time that they were cre­ated (more peo­ple dying of tuber­cu­lo­sis at the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury; fewer deaths can be attrib­uted to mul­ti­ple causes) and the pol­i­tics (why exactly does a state want to know that peo­ple are dying in “acci­dents from trans­port, acci­dents in mines and quar­ries, agri­cul­tural and forestry acci­dents, or acci­dents due to machin­ery” and why is it ok to group those together?).

“Figure/ground” builds on the idea of boot­strap­ping. It’s a way of think­ing about infra­struc­ture that doesn’t see it solely as the prod­uct of human con­struc­tion or as a con­text shap­ing human activ­ity. Infra­struc­ture is both at the same time. When a clas­si­fi­ca­tion becomes a part of an infra­struc­ture, for exam­ple, it is embed­ded by some­one apply­ing agency.That agent is influ­enced by the larger assump­tions of the larger infra­struc­ture. That is, new clas­si­fi­ca­tions and stan­dards only make sense within the larger ecol­ogy of exist­ing infra­struc­ture. That clas­si­fi­ca­tion then simul­ta­ne­ously becomes part of the ecol­ogy for think­ing about the infra­struc­ture. Fur­ther devel­op­ment of infra­struc­tures will there­after have to fight with the orig­i­nal stan­dards and classifications.

Figure/ground is impor­tant for think­ing broadly about infra­struc­ture. It’s not that some­one can’t remove a clas­si­fi­ca­tion such as “died from tuber­cu­lo­sis,” although this could become dif­fi­cult as well if the stan­dards have become widely mate­ri­ally and socially enforced (think elec­tri­cal power lines, pipe fit­tings, or vot­ing procedures) it’s more that the entire infra­struc­ture was con­cep­tu­ally estab­lished as a whole with that clas­si­fi­ca­tion as a part of it. If you’re famil­iar with the parole/langue idea from Saus­sure, figure/ground is an elab­o­ra­tion that has been fil­tered through infra­struc­tural theory.

Bowker calls the sum of these ana­lytic meth­ods infra­struc­tural inver­sion, a con­cept with con­tributes to a good part of his work.

So noth­ing new for infra­struc­tural the­o­rists, but a good break­down and dis­cus­sion of key con­cepts. The arti­cle serves as primer/recap  for those inter­ested in think­ing the­o­ret­i­cally about infrastructure.

Posted by NRJ at 3:19 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Bowker's "Time, Money, and Biodiversity."

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Jun 302011

Bowker, Geof­frey C. “Time, Money, and Bio­di­ver­sity.” In Global Assem­blages: Tech­nol­ogy, Pol­i­tics, and Ethics as Anthro­po­log­i­cal Prob­lems, edited by John D. Kelly, Beat­rice Jau­regui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Wal­ton, 107–123. Malden, MA: Black­well, 2005.

Geoff Bowker is a fas­ci­nat­ing per­son to read. In his writ­ing, he con­sis­tently tran­si­tions from his­tor­i­cal analy­sis to crit­i­cal the­ory, which makes him both a plea­sure to read and frus­trat­ing as hell. At some points, his books are com­pletely lucid, and then they’ll throw in an aside, foot­note, or sin­gle sen­tence that seems com­pletely inde­ci­pher­able. It’s awe­some, because he draws read­ers in and then makes them think really hard.

This chap­ter from the Global Assem­blages col­lec­tion (I believe it also informs much of his book Mem­ory Prac­tices in the Sci­ences, too) is largely about bio­di­ver­sity and eco­log­i­cal pol­icy, but the parts that are most intrigu­ing are his dis­cus­sions about modal­i­ties for deal­ing with bio­di­ver­sity: essen­tially, the the­ory behind the research.  By modal­ity, I’m assum­ing he is talk­ing about sig­nif­i­cant crit­i­cal points for under­stand­ing bio­di­ver­sity and related infra­struc­tures. Because he’s inter­ested in com­plex infor­ma­tional ecosys­tems that are clas­si­fied and stan­dard­ized by biol­o­gists, ecol­o­gists, etc, etc, this paper dove­tails well with his other writ­ing on infor­ma­tion infrastructure.

He describes two modal­i­ties that are typ­i­cally used for talk­ing about bio­di­ver­sity. The first he calls implo­sion, which I’ll focus on here. (In case you’re curi­ous, the sec­ond is clas­si­fi­ca­tion and tax­on­omy, which means mak­ing huge lists and hier­ar­chies to cat­a­log all types of flora and fauna). Implo­sion describes a way of assign­ing value to ecosys­tems and ecosys­tem com­po­nents. Implo­sion involves cre­at­ing some­thing akin to a cur­rency for talk­ing about bio­di­ver­sity. If you’re famil­iar with the car­bon trad­ing con­cept, it seems that the same form of dis­course is used to assign value for bio­di­ver­sity. Bowker explains implo­sion by using money as a metaphor. In Bowker’s descrip­tion, sci­en­tists come up with a cur­rency that will enable exchange among dif­fer­ent parts of ecosys­tems. Implo­sion works by pro­ject­ing a cer­tain type of value across dif­fer­ent things and sug­gest­ing that those things are actu­ally sim­i­lar (or at least focus­ing on one sim­i­lar aspect). For instance, sug­gest­ing that tiger is worth more than that flea, for exam­ple, because the num­ber of species of fleas far out­num­ber that of felines.  If a flea species goes away, it’s not as impor­tant as if pan­thera tigris dis­ap­pears. After all, we have dozens of sim­i­lar flea species and not nearly as many tigers.  Ecosys­tems are reduced to exchange. (This exam­ple was hypo­thet­i­cal — don’t quote me on it).

Clearly, there are some issues with this. For one, how would one talk about the fact that a cer­tain flea species might have a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship with the tiger and that allow­ing habi­tats of that flea species to be altered would sig­nif­i­cantly alter the tiger species. What if a less valu­able ecosys­tem part actu­ally enables things that would seem more valu­able. Sec­ond, how can a value exchange rate deal with the con­cept of time? Species emerge and die off fre­quently. Can a value exchange rate han­dle talk­ing about bio­di­ver­sity in terms of time, evo­lu­tion, or species adap­tion? Last, and maybe most sig­nif­i­cantly, to assign value to ecosys­tem parts simul­ta­ne­ously cre­ates a self/other rela­tion­ship with nature. Are humans left out of dis­cus­sions of value? Do we have a value as well? Does that include all types of humans? If so, do we label our­selves as the most valu­able part of ecosys­tems? Why?

The most inter­est­ing part of this chap­ter for me was when he dis­cussed how peo­ple con­sid­ered indige­nous will often be swept up into the dis­course as the other side of a self/other binary. That is, in the lan­guage of value and bio­di­ver­sity, some peo­ple are less “human” and more “nature” than oth­ers. Fas­ci­nat­ing and scary at the same time.

Bowker does an awe­some job of show­ing the real world impli­ca­tions of implo­sion for bio­di­ver­sity dis­course, but this is also an inter­est­ing way to think about a huge num­ber of other infor­ma­tion infra­struc­tures. For exam­ple, the con­cept of implo­sion could work well for think­ing about tech­ni­cal stan­dard­iza­tion of con­tem­po­rary tech­nolo­gies. Tech­ni­cal stan­dards work to flat­ten real world dif­fer­ences into one value exchange rate. Even tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments like those of the W3C and ISO, despite their usu­ally utopian claims for a bet­ter tomor­row, embed pri­or­i­ties and val­ues that do work to dis­em­power some groups, objects, and ecolo­gies. (Patrick Feng wrote a good overview of stan­dards — check it out). Bowker’s chap­ter is a great read.

Posted by NRJ at 11:09 am Tagged with: , , , , ,