Taxis

This is a response to a prompt over at the TAXIS blog, where we read the first chapter of the classic Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

---

Media in their broken states can tell us as much about their social construction as they can in their putatively “normal” modes of operation, so I’ve taken an interest in how the designers and manufacturers of CD players and CD media have managed defects in their engineering work. I’ll set aside the question of exactly where or what the “infrastructure” is here—is it the defect-handling electronics? the players? the damaged discs? the entire CD media “ecology”?—for the moment and focus instead on the work of classification in the management of defects in optical media. Most of the sources for the material in this post are journal articles and published reports of research done at various sites over the last 30 or 40 years, with a focus on the CD. I’m drawing on the chosen reading for guidance about how to parse this material as well as where I should look for more.

Doing some reading for my current project (a history of the CD Audio format), I stumbled across a physical phenomenon that does not often crop up in discussions of the history of gramophone recording: the Buchmann-Meyer effect. This optical effect was once used to measure the quality of gramophone records, both qualitatively and quantiatively, by shining a band of light on a disc and capturing the characteristic “Christmas tree”–like pattern that is reflected back to the viewer. If the pattern is clear and distinct, the record is in good nick; if the “branches” of the pattern are ill defined, the disc surface has perhaps become subject to wear and disintegration, or, indeed, was never fabricated to a high standard in the first place. In a figure from a very interesting recent paper—interesting for other reasons!—we see three discs.¹ Visible are Buchmann-Meyer patterns reflected from the A and B sides of an Audio Engineering Society test record from 2007 (well defined) and one from an undated lacquer transcription disc, probably produced in France (not as well-defined).