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Title: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star ISBN: 0262522950 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 28 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4
Rating: 4
Summary: A real advance in knowledge - inspiring.
Comment: Most everything in modern societies rests on rules, standards, and regulations of one kind or another. Where do these endless detailed lists and definitions come from? This book is really unprecedented in the way it takes apart the practice of rule-making and nomenclature, to show us that there is a social and cultural process that lies behind the faceless lists. For me, it was like having the curtain of OZ lifted aside, so I could see for once the messy, petty, and often political way that things are sorted into categories and labeled.
I disagee that the book is badly written. I found it better than the average academic title in studies of technology and society, where thick jargon is the primordial soup. This was one of the most original books about technological systems I have read in years, with wide application in many different fields.
Rating: 3
Summary: A diamond-studded dungheap
Comment: This tragic book is full of important ideas and significant research, but it's so poorly written you hardly notice. Other reviews kindly describe its style as "academic," but it's just bad writing. It's really shocking that publishers still consider this kind of jargon-filled nonsense acceptable to publish outside of the UMI thesis-reprint circuit. (I write professionally, so I'm not unqualified to make this assertion.)
After making a cogent point with examples and internal references, the authors feel the need to bridge to the next section with this clotted delight:
"Leaking out of the freeze frame, comes the insertion of biography, negotiation, and struggles with a shifting infrastructure of classification and treatment. Turning now to other presentation and classification of tuberculosis by a novelist and a sociologist, we will see the complex dialectic of irrevocably local biography and of standard classification."
Wha? What you mean to say is:
"This tension between personal experience and clinical priorities plays a large part in our current understanding of 'tuberculosis.' To further examine this tension, we will now examine the personal tuberculosis stories of a novelist and a sociologist."
The former kind of self-important, get-it-all-down academic writing is as embarrassing to read as adolescent poetry; they're both driven by a desire to make sure the reader gets every last nuance, and the lack of subtlety makes you want to toss the book across the room.
But the ideas buried within this book...the ideas are so sweet. If only they'd had the sense to ghostwrite this book. It could be a classic.
Rating: 5
Summary: classification as discourse
Comment: This is an excellent book on classification as discourse. The authors do an excellent job of discussing this topic in terms of its social, political, and professional history and implications. It is an important title in the cultural studies of information and should be familiar to all concerned with this area of study.
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Title: The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid ISBN: 1578517087 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 15 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing) by Elaine Svenonius ISBN: 0262194333 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 18 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing) by Christine L. Borgman ISBN: 026202473X Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 20 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
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Title: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff ISBN: 0226468046 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 1990 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Organization of Information: by Arlene G. Taylor ISBN: 1563084988 Publisher: Libraries Unlimited Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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