Archives and/as Infrastructures for Knowledge and Ignorance

• In Event: Constructing Memories: Comparative Historical Sociotechical Analysis of Media, Communication and Information

Abstract

Histories of infrastructures are often uncovered by reading archives as both describing evidence of infrastructures as well as representations of information infrastructures (Star 1999). And from this perspective, we can ideally learn how knowledge infrastructures produce and circulate information. But work in the “sociology of ignorance” prompts questions about how information infrastructures don’t facilitate the circulation of knowledge, but produce a lack of understanding in both users and in the researchers (Abbot 2010; McGoey 2012; Mueller 2018). Here, I explore how knowledge and negative knowledge (Knorr-Cetina 1981) are revealed and obscured through archives as infrastructures. I identify multiple modes in which “ignorance” is produced with knowledge infrastructures, highlighting how non-knowledge can be “seen” through comparative approaches. Even when researchers themselves are in a state of “ignorance”, historical comparison can both surface absences and introduce presentist expectations and interpretations. I will analyze several moments in which public information infrastructures facilitated knowledge about earthquake events, and crucially, what was not produced and circulated. A comparative sociotechnical historical lens is useful for developing a nuanced framework for deciphering the varying modes in which knowledge infrastructures can produce ignorance.

References:
Abbott, Andrew (2010). Varieties of ignorance. The American Sociologist 41 (2), 174–189.

Knorr-Cetina, K., (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist
and Contextual Nature of Science. Pergamon Press, Oxford.

McGoey, Linsey (2012) Strategic unknowns: towards a sociology of ignorance,
Economy and Society, 41:1, 1-16

Mueller, Jennifer C. (2018) Advancing a Sociology of Ignorance in the Study of Racism and Racial Non‐knowing. Sociology Compass 12, no. 8.

Star, Susan L. (1999) “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 : 377–91.

Author

• Megan Finn, University of Washington