Infrastructural Inversion as a Generative Resource in Digital Scholarship

Abstract

Digital humanities scholarship has regularly challenged characteristic organizational features of academic life in the humanities. For example, it is typically practiced in larger collaborative projects that produce output very different from the traditional scholarly monograph. Digital humanists often present their work in strikingly reflexive accounts that are reminiscent of what science and technology studies scholars have called infrastructural inversion, a method that defamiliarizes the socio-material infrastructure of research to expose the inner workings of knowledge production. At first sight, infrastructural inversion might seem to constitute the opposite of the older concept of articulation work, which designates the situated activity of coordinating and managing cooperative work processes. It is more useful, however, to think about infrastructural inversion as a specific form of articulation work. The inversions performed by digital scholars serve to highlight and problematize established ways of streamlining articulation work, for example, through the established model of peer review, or by using conventional forms of scholarly output. In turn, such systematic defamiliarization opens up new and potentially competing ways of imagining the organization of articulation work.

Exploring the (missed) connections between digital scholarship and faculty development: a conceptual analysis

“…As Terras et al pointed out Digital Humanities as a term (…) provides a big tent for all digital scholarship in the humanities (2013, p.140). The scholars connected to this perspective worked intensely to define the boarders of theory and practices as a field of research (Unsworth, 2013), embraced the new forms of representation of cultural heritage, including history, arts and literature through the digital medium (Bentkowska-Kafel, 2013;Gardiner & Musto, 2015;Kaltenbrunner, 2015). Moreover, the term encompassed the debate connected to the changing research methods and required professionalism in the humanities along an interdisciplinary dialogue with digital technologies (Klein, 2015).…”

Data Labours: How the Sequence Databases GenBank and EMBL-Bank Make Data

“…Through these at times ad hoc exchanges the databases adapt and grow. The packaging of data and infrastructural inversion are thus oftentimes co-extensive (Bowker and Star 2000;Leonelli, 2009Leonelli, , 2014Kaltenbrunner, 2015). The current submission is part of a metagenomic record from an acid mine drainage project.…”

“…Moving them centre stage in analysis constitutes an infrastructural inversion, a conceptual method which brings to light background routines and thus recovers the choices and selections built into infrastructure (Bowker and Star, 2000). Following Kaltenbrunner (2015) I suggest infrastructural inversion as the third type of articulation work. In relation to convergence it describes the works which deal with and negotiate the (historical) particularities of the things which are converging.…”

An Afterword to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’

“…This is perhaps one of those usefully flexible notions such as the rich, entrenched concept of 'boundary objects' (Star and Griesemer 1989), which can generate new kinds of discourses among communities in science and technology studies, CSCW and practitioners. While the articles in the special issues have been grounded in its initial analytic form (Bowker 1994), we can see in the wider literature that there are also other ways of using the concept -including the ethnographic/ empirical (Harvey et al 2017) and the generative/designerly (Kaltenbrunner 2015;Parmiggiani 2015;Korn and Voida 2015). It is clear that we need to forge new bridges between analysis and design in order to account for and deal with the complexities of infrastructuring.…”