Place as boundary object: the Manitoba Oil Museum

This article presents an approach for the design of location-based information systems that support privacy functionality. Privacy-enhancing technology (PET) has been available for a considerable amount of time. New online applications and infrastructures for mobile and ubiquitous use have been installed. This has been done without usage of available PET, although they are favored by data protection experts. Designers of locationbased services (LBS) create infrastructures for business or application specific purposes. They have profitoriented views on the rationale for PET deployment. Finally, users have requirements that might be neither on the PET community’s nor on the business people's agenda. Many disciplines provide knowledge about the construction of community-spanning information systems. The challenge for designers of infrastructures and applications is to find a consensus that models all stakeholders’ interests – and takes advantage all involved community’s knowledge. This paper groups LBS stakeholders into a framework based onto a sociological knowledge construct called “boundary object”. For this purpose, a taxonomical analysis of publications in the stakeholder communities is performed. Then the paper proposes a socio-technical approach. Its goal is to find a suitable privacy design for a LBS infrastructure based on the boundary object. Topics for further interdisciplinary research efforts are identified and proposed for discussion.

Download Full-text

Insomnia, Medicalization, and Expert Knowledge

Canadian Bulletin of Medical History ◽

10.3138/cbmh.461-072020 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Kenton Kroker

Keyword(s):

Public Health ◽

Expert Knowledge ◽

Public Health Intervention ◽

Sleep Medicine ◽

Health Intervention ◽

Human Condition ◽

Boundary Object ◽

Medical Expertise ◽

Health Authorities ◽

Public Health Authorities

Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia’s history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.

Download Full-text

Pioneers and Feminisms

Digital Culture & Society ◽

10.14361/dcs-2020-0206 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 87-114

Author(s):

Rachel Pierce

Keyword(s):

Identity Politics ◽

Qualitative Content Analysis ◽

Primary Source ◽

Women's Movements ◽

Boundary Object ◽

Digital Archives ◽

Digital Collections ◽

Photographic Material ◽

Feminist Historiography ◽

Resource Library

Abstract Feminist historiography is rife with debates about the nature and boundaries of women’s movements. Arguments over who to call an activist or a feminist sit at the heart of these definitional debates, which provide the groundwork for how scholars understand contemporary feminisms. Given the heated nature of ongoing disputes over the complicated identity politics of feminism and its archives, it is surprising that scholars have afforded so little attention to the technical infrastructure that defines and provides access to digitized primary source material, which is increasingly the foundation for contemporary historical research. Metadata plays an outsized role in these definitions, especially for photographic material that cannot be made word-searchable but is favored by digitizers because of its popularity. This article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how two digital archives define the Swedish suffrage movement - a historically contested concept, here understood through the theory of Susan Leigh Star as a “boundary object” subject to “interpretive flexibility”. The study uses keywords attached to photographic material from the the National Resource Library for Gender Studies (KvinnSam) and metadata within the related Swedish Women’s Biographical Lexicon platform for women’s biographies. The findings indicate that the hierarchies of archival organization do not disappear with individual document digitization and description. Instead, the silences built into physical archives are redefined in digital collections, obscuring the tensions between individual and movement feminisms, as well as the contested nature of movement boundaries.

Download Full-text