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This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. Infrastructure is both relational and ecological-it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs, and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.
Resources appear, too, as shared visions of the possible and acceptable dreams of the innovative, as techniques, knowledge, know-how, and the institutions for learning these things. Infrastructure in these terms is a dense interwoven fabric that is, at the same time, dynamic, thoroughly ecological, even fragile. -Bucciarelli, 1994, p. 131 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things. -Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817 GENERAL METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS This article is in a way a call to study boring things. Many aspects of infrastructure are singularly unexciting. They appear as lists of numbers and technical specifications, or as hidden mechanisms subtending those processes more familiar to social scientists. It takes some digging to unearth the dramas inherent in system design creating, to restore narrative to what appears to be dead lists.
Bowker and Star (in press) note of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), a global information-collecting system administered by the World Health Organization,
Reading the ICD is a lot like reading the telephone book. In fact, it is worse. The telephone book, especially the yellow pages, contains a more obvious degree of narrative structure. It tells how local businesses see themselves, how many restaurants of a given ethnicity there are in the locale, whether or not hot tubs or plastic surgeons are to be found there. (Yet most people don't...