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Josephine Bosma said: > This sums up my fears for this conference, and I can only pray they are > unfounded. The problem is that defining media art and writing > media art history is no longer a purely scientific enterprise. It is > really largely out of the hands of the academia. This conference > should therefore avoid the common set up and organization for academic > conferences. So far it does not seem to do that. There's an excellent book called 'sorting things out: classification and its consequences' that looks at how classifactions and taxonomies emerge and are used in professional communities. The authors use a number of examples to look at the role of 'invisibility' in classification, and how the invisible work of classification can be made visible to users of a taxonomy (this is what wikipedia does par excellence). One of the most interesting examples is the 'Nursing Intervention Classification', a database set up by nurses in Iowa to make their work more visible, and valued, by hospital authorities. the creation of NIC helped raise the profile of the work nurses did, and gained them more respect within the hospital heirarchy, as well as demonstrating the economics of nursing provision. But there were constant tensions between the bureaucratic process the NIC was trying to interface with, and the softer nature of nurses' actual practise: "Social-psychological care giving is one of the areas where this dilemma is prominent. For example, NIC lists as nursing interventions "anticipatory guidance" and "mood management" - preperation for grief and surgery. Difficult though these are to capture in a classification scheme, one much more difficult is "humor". How can one capture humour as a deliberate nursing intervention? When do you stop? How to reimburse humor, hoe to measure this kind of care?" There are obvious parallels here with the debates about the classification and taxonomy of digital art, both in the roles of the practitioners in creating the actual taxonomy, and the interface with existing 'official' taxonomies. I fully agree with Josephine that it would be a shame if the Refresh conference didn't make visible the 'invisible' work behind the taxonomies/classifications it is attempting to authenticate. There has been a lot of work done in the last 10-15 years on the social processes of technological innovation (eg the work of Bijker and Pinch), and the concept of 'folk' taxonomies is very hot within mainstream digital culture. It would be a huge missed opportunity if the Refresh conference didn't use these valuable lenses in their analysis of media/digital art. Oliver - is this something the conference will be exploring? matt sorting things out: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262522950