“It's infrastructure all the way down” (keynote address)

Abstract

What is infrastructure and how shall we know it? As libraries move partly to desktops, one of the challenges facing the digital library community becomes designing for distributed use across many kinds of local circumstance. These circumstances vary widely in terms of people, resources, support, and technical configurations. Designing for this variety means reconceptualizing “user meets screen” as “user meets infrastructure.” This requires scaling up traditional design and evaluation methods, as well as a richer knowledge of the organizational and historical contexts of use. This talk addresses some of the methodological challenges involved in such work. Susan Leigh Star (Leigh) is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D in sociology of science and medicine from UC San Francisco. Before coming to UCSD in 1999, she was Professor of Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has also taught at UC Irvine and Keele University, in England, and several universities in Scandinavia as guest professor. Much of her research has been on the social implications and design of large-scale technology, especially information technology. Among her publications are "The Cultures of Computing" (ed) (Blackwell, 1995), "Regions of the Mind: Brain Research and the Quest for Scientific Certainty" (Stanford 1989), and (with Geoffrey Bowker), "Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences" (MIT, 1999). She is volume editor for Science and Technology for the Women's Studies International Encyclopedia (edited by Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender), forthcoming from Routledge in 2000. Her current research concerns ethical and methodological dilemmas in on-line research with human subjects.