While a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1980s, Star was a protégé of famous sociologists Anselm Strauss and Howard Becker. She learned qualitative methods and later in her career applied them to information systems and virtual worlds.  Ethnography of Infrastructure is her theoretical statement about the complex assemblages of material and immaterial objects constituting and underlying technologies, which she casts as “infrastructure.” The paper also delineates how ethnography is an ideal research method to apply to the study and betterment of infrastructure.

In a fast-paced 15 minutes, my video introduces Star as a scholar; situates her paper in the literature of its day; surveys the properties of infrastructure; outlines her proposed ethnographic toolkit; and notes her critical concern for the silencing power of infrastructure.  The video also gently critiques what I perceive as minor shortcomings to the article. Yet in the positive tradition of the series, the video concludes by proclaiming what makes this paper great. (Indeed, it is among my personal top-10 favorites in Information Science.) A hyperlinked Table of Contents to the video appears below, so that readers may jump directly to an area of interest.