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To the untrained eye, a 17^th century mortality table, this year’s new racially inclusive census, and the separation of machine from hand washables would appear to have little in common. But to historian Geoffrey Bowker and sociologist Susan Leigh Star, both professors in the Communication Department at the University of California, San Diego, these details reveal a great deal about the culture they serve.

In their recent book, "Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences," (MIT Press) the authors explain the role of categories and standards -- from the classification of races, diseases, and types of work practices, to family relations, environments, and e-mail systems --in shaping the modern world. The authors, experts on the scaffolding of information infrastructures, also trace the controversy of racial classifications, from the racial identification of South Africans during apartheid and affirmative action efforts in the U.S. to the multiple racial categories included in the 2000 census.

The authors remind us that although we may be unaware most of the time of the social and moral order created by these invisible yet potent systems, their impact is indisputable and inescapable, and like it or not, they pretty much rule our lives.

"Try the simple experiment of ignoring your gender classification and use instead whichever toilets are the nearest; try to locate a library book shelved under the wrong Library of Congress catalogue number; stand in the immigration queue at a busy foreign airport without the right passport or arrive without the transformer and the adaptor that translates between electrical standards. The material force of categories appears always and instantly."

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 environment. In the same way that an urban historian would review development permits and zoning decisions to tell a city’s story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made.

"These standards and classifications, however superimposed on our lives, are ordinarily invisible, " write Bowker and Star in their book. "The formal, bureaucratic ones trail behind them the entourage of permits, forms, numerals, and the sometimes-visible work of people who adjust them to make organizations run smoothly. In that sense, they become more visible only when they break down or become objects of contention. But, what are these categories? Who makes them and who may change them? What, for instance, is the relationship among locally generated categories, tailored to the particular space of a bathroom cabinet, and the commodified, elaborate, expensive ones generated by medical diagnoses, government regulatory bodies, and pharmaceutical firms?"

While to classify may be human, systems of classification always project a moral agenda, according to the authors, for each standard and category espouses some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage and suffering; Jobs are made and lost and some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the heart of "Sorting Things Out."

"People do many things today that a few hundred years ago would have looked like magic," write the authors. "And, if we don’t understand a given technology today it looks like magic: for example we are perpetually surprised by the mellifluous tones read off our favorite CDs by, we believe, a laser. Most of us have no notion of the decades of negotiation that inform agreement on standard disc size, speed, electronic setting, and amplification standards. It is not dissimilar to the experience of magic one enjoys at a fine restaurant or an absorbing play."

The Web is another good example of seamless magic buttressed by an invisible yet massive and elaborate system of information. According to Bowker and Star, users of the Internet alone navigate, fairly seamlessly, more than 200 formally elected Internet standards for information transmission each time they send an e-mail message. Every link in hypertext creates a category. That is, it reflects some judgement about two or more objects: they are the same, or alike, or functionally linked, or linked as part of an unfolding system.

For more information on Professors Bowker and Star and their research visit the Communication Department web site at: http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/faculty.html