Infrastructuring digital humanities: On relational infrastructure and global reconfiguration of the field

Abstract

How do the power dynamics of actors in digital knowledge production define the contours of global science and humanities? Where are scholars now in their efforts to improve a networked, global academic system based on the values of equal access to resources, inclusive participation, and the diversity of epistemologies? This article intervenes in these questions by discussing social dimensions of global knowledge infrastructure—connection, standardization, and access—to understand the specification and materialization of global digital humanities (DH). As digital practices expand across the world, the DH community struggles to ensure inclusive participation and equal opportunities in developing the field. This article shows that discrepancies in global DH lie at the root of existing infrastructure inequalities. Drawing on science and technology studies, it then argues that in order to overcome these imbalances, the academic community can seek the ‘infrastructuring’ of DH. Infrastructuring is an analytical concept that shifts attention from ‘structure’ to ‘process’ of co-creation in the vein of participatory design that foregrounds public engagement, shared interest, and long-term relationships with stakeholders to create networks from which equal opportunities and new forms of connections can emerge. This would involve building an inclusive network of unique nodes of local communities on top of the global knowledge infrastructure.

Feasibility documents as critical structuring objects: An approach to the study of documents in digital research production

“…Liu proposed the study of Digital Humanities centres as laboratories, similar to the ethnography of scientific laboratories developed in science and technology studies (Hess, 2001). A Digital Humanities lab is a site where humanities thinking is integrated with computational, engineering and organisational practices (Malazita et al, 2020; Pawlicka-Deger, 2020; Smithies and Ciula, 2020). It is therefore a technologically and socially dense organisation where an observer can uncover the practices and patterns behind task-oriented projects and team interactions and is a place of culture informed by local settings and policy.…”