Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

By J. Marc Overhage, Jeffery G. Suico. 2001

4,185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

In Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

Citations in the corpus

Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision (2021, background): “There are inherent problems with race and gender classifications, as e.g. Bowker & Star (2000) and Keyes (2018) have shown.”
Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society (2023, background): “Given that the exclusion of harmful content within datasets stand to create distinct harms to marginalized communities, efforts towards mitigation of generating harmful content becomes a question of the politics of classification [36, 135, 72, 242] and its potential harms.”
Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development (2021, neutral): “Bowker and Star discussed the politics imbued in technical classification systems, like those of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) [14].”
Towards Accountability for Machine Learning Datasets: Practices from Software Engineering and Infrastructure (2020, background): “Datasets are also infrastructure in the infrastructure studies sense, in that they arrange a way to view and structure knowledge of the world [22, 88].”
How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms (2016, background): “…of view and silences another’ and there is a long history of lives ‘broken, twisted, and torqued by their encounters with classiﬁcation systems’ such as the race classiﬁcation system of apartheid South Africa and the categorization of tuberculosis patients, as they detail (Bowker and Star, 1999).”
The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research (2021, methodology): “, LWPR [8], standard GPR [1], sparse online Gaussian process regression (OGP) [5] and υ-support vector regression (υ-SVR) [11], respectively.”
A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP (2021, background): “At worst, it risks reinforcing racism by presenting racial divisions as natural, rather than the product of social and historical context (Bowker and Star, 2000).”
Fairer machine learning in the real world: Mitigating discrimination without collecting sensitive data (2017, background): “As with many issues in machine learning, the political nature of this classifying and sorting has long been recognised (Bowker and Star, 1999).”
The Role of Narratives in Sustaining Organizational Innovation (2009, background): “Additional information, including rights and permission policies, is available at http://journals.informs.org/. social entities, such as business units, functional departments , or professional groups (Bowker and Star 1999, Carlile 2004).”
Economic markets as calculative collective devices (2005, background): “8 See also Latour (1987) and Bowker & Star (1999) .”
HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics (2010, background): “First, the dilemma between transformation and stasis, and in particular the repressive nature of stasis, manifests itself most particularly in the role that technology frequently plays in regulation and governance [1, 10, 49].”
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook (2018, background): “As a result, infrastructures are “learned as part of membership” in communities, nations, and lifeworlds (Bowker and Star, 1999; Edwards, 2002).”
Between Subjectivity and Imposition (2020, background): “Power imbalances related to practices of classification have long been a topic of interest for the social sciences [9, 11, 13, 16, 32, 57].”
Sociotechnical Harms: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction (2022, background): “This process involves design decisions predicated on “selection, reduction, and categorization” [33] through which technologies come to reflect the values of certain worldviews [33, 188].”
Object of Activity and Individual Motivation (2005, background): “For instance, Bordieu’s (1998) theory of practice suggested that the task of sociology is to explain how “the biological libido, an undifferentiated impulse” is transformed and socialized into “socially constituted interests” (pp. 78–79). However, restricting the final foundation of interests to the”