Sorting Things Out

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.

Author Biography

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out- Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press.

Susan Leigh Star was Doreen Boyce Chair for Library and Information Science, University of Pittsburgh.