Bookpile 3: Standards and their Stories
Bookpile is short posts on Fridays about what I’m reading now and what I’m liking about it. This week, it’s Standards and their Stories, a collection edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star.
If I remember right, I first read one of the chapters from Standards and their Stories sometime between 2009 and 2011. “ASCII Imperialism” by Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme opened my eyes to the unevenness and injustice baked into such apparently mundane things as which character set is used to write URLs for websites.
Standards and their Stories is full of moments like that – when something suddenly becomes irrevocably and unavoidably obvious. As an edited collection, it’s easy to just dip in and out and read the chapters that feel necessary at a given moment. That’s why it’s been fifteen years since I first read part of it, and I’ve never read the whole thing. That changes now for me.
Aside from being a collection of brilliant chapters by individual scholars writing on standards (in many senses of the word, and not always strictly technical), it’s also full of wonderful snippets from out in the world. It contrasts a chapter on the question of the standard human in pharmaceutical development with everyday, mostly unchallenged artefacts like standard growth charts for children. In bringing these everyday traces of standards into conversation with in-depth research on standards processes, Lampland and Star make standards – abstract, technical, boring – touchable and imaginable.
