Introduction “Object of Study”

Critical Infrastructure Studies

Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, infrastructure has become a key interest among humanities and social science scholars well beyond the engineering, planning, and economics fields traditionally concerned with systems of material, built things. Ethnographers of organizational technology and others associated with science-technology studies (STS) led the way by studying “knowledge infrastructures,” especially digital ones.1 Also relevant was the history of technology (HOT) field adjacent to STS, whose research in such areas as large technical systems (LTS) bears on infrastructure studies.2 Meanwhile, “thing theorists” explored the philosophy, social force, and aesthetics of “things.”3 Then others working on architecture, cities, the environment, various resources (e.g., oil, water, rare earth metals), waste and garbage, transportation and logistics, media (especially “media infrastructures”), feminism, race, ethnicity, postcolonialism, literature and art, and other areas extended “infrastructuralism,” as it has also been called, in many directions, including historical infrastructures at the beginning of technological and industrial modernity.4 Infrastructure has become a capacious, polyvalent framework for addressing the materials, technologies, agents, and actions that make, and also unmake and remake, societies.5 Beyond academic publications, infrastructure studies also has a vibrant, public-facing presence in writing and photography from many disciplinary perspectives in such online journals as Places, Scenario, e-flux, Mediapolis, Platform, and Society+Space.

The study of infrastructure thus joins a lineage of previous intellectual paradigms, each of which looked at the world afresh from the viewpoint of a specific object of study, in object’s epistemic sense as a theme or topic.6 Since the nineteenth century, this methodological lineage (eventually more a meshwork than a single line of descent) has taken up objects of study that include the following:

• Ideas (in traditions of intellectual history such as Hegelian philosophy and German Geisteswissenschaften, Anglo-American history of ideas, and French histoire des mentalités)
• Mind (from psychoanalytic theory to recent cognitive science)
• Language (in structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literature, and other fields)
• Design (as professionalized and theorized after the Bauhaus era in architecture, industrial design, graphic arts, user interface design, and other design fields)
• Institution (in organizational and neoinstitutional studies)
• Ideology and culture (in cultural studies from the 1960s on)
• Identity (in race, ethnicity, gender, postcolonial, and other approaches to social groups and nationalities)
• Environment (in environmental studies)
• Media (in media and digital new media studies)

Each paradigm directed inquiry in novel directions, advancing new questions and new ways to ask those questions. Each also unpredictably inflected the others. After the linguistic turn of the 1970s, for example, ideas looked surprisingly different when seen as language, which in turn was transformed when seen from the viewpoint of mind (e.g., in Lacanian theory), design (e.g., in postmodern architecture), identity (e.g., in gendered or racial forms), media (e.g., in “post-truth” social media memes), and so on.7

As a recently minted object of humanistic and social science study, infrastructure is distinctive among the other paradigms that it joins because it surfaces the literal objects that, in Martin Heidegger’s terms, “enframes” any epistemic object of study as a “standing-reserve” of technologized things “ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”8 In infrastructure studies, all objects of study are constituted in their primary phenomena, as well as in the secondary instruments used to observe them, by materials, structures, and tools that are built, created, developed, supported, improved, maintained, protected, expanded, strengthened, enabled, implemented, installed, supplied, deployed (some of infrastructure’s most common verb collocates)9 for the purpose, in Heidegger’s vocabulary, of being ordered (like pressing an “execute” button) to operate as infrastructure. But for infrastructure studies, more existentially, all objects of study and their instruments of study are in an ontological sense part of the order of being itself. Thus, for instance, ideas and language, among the paradigms mentioned here, are shaped qua objects of study through technologies that are existentially part of what it means to be a human being today—whether in the form of human bodies using “verbomotor” techniques (Ong, 66) or in that of extensions of such corporeal expression as writing or print, modern analog information technologies (like the Zettelkasten index-card system that Niklas Luhmann famously used),10 or today’s digital information technologies. Infrastructures not only do, but are the core existential action of human being (with all its collocates of building, creating, developing, supporting, and so on among other verb collocates).

Indeed, to expand the scope of this line of thought, infrastructure studies is properly understood as addressing not just the infrastructure behind any epistemic object but, reciprocally, the epistemic in any infrastructure. From this point of view, which accords with actor-network theory (ANT) in STS, it is not just authors but assemblages of bodies-pens-printing presses-index cards-the internet and other entities, including, recently, artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs), that “know” ideas, mind, language, identity, or anything else.

One other principal characteristic of infrastructure studies is important to mention because it sets the stage for recent developments. Literal objects are never “just” literal, in the sense of being inertly or passively received as a given.11 Instead, objects are composed as infrastructure through dynamic processes of ontological, epistemological, and social relations.12 While one of the best-known axioms in Susan Leigh Star’s “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999), a founding work of infrastructure studies, is that infrastructure “becomes visible upon breakdown,” meaning that it is “invisible” (taken for granted) until “the server is down, the bridge washes out, [and] there is a power blackout” (382),13 the other crucial axiom is that “infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept” (380), meaning that infrastructure toggles between invisibility and visibility depending on how one person is positioned relative to it versus another.14 As Star observes, “the normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks” (382) or, equally important, when it comes into focus from a relationally different social viewpoint as a “topic, or difficulty”:

For a railroad engineer, the rails are not infrastructure but topic. For the person in a wheelchair, the stairs and doorjamb in front of a building are not seamless subtenders of use, but barriers. . . . One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty. As Star and Ruhleder (1996) put it, infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practices. . . . So, within a given cultural context, the cook considers the water system as working infrastructure integral to making dinner. For the city planner or the plumber, it is a variable in a complex planning process or a target for repair (380).15

For ordinary consumers or for cooks, therefore, the plumbing and its water source are givens. The system just works. But infrastructure suddenly comes into focus as a “topic, or difficulty” (a perspective shift that Geoffrey Bowker calls “infrastructural inversion”) when it stops working—and never more so than when seen from a different social standpoint.16 Thus, for instance, a city planner might see a broken municipal water system as an opportunity for a contract bid, while marginalized communities afflicted with contaminated water systems or water scarcity—important topics in recent infrastructure studies17—must see it as an existential threat.

A powerful idea will eventually arise from fusing the brokenness and relationality axioms of infrastructure studies. Recognizing this idea for what it is requires seeing it in sharp relief against an easily missed, historically specific premise of infrastructure: infrastructure as a concept is a modern idea.18 Of course, built structures of all kinds ranging from small to immense, and simple to complex, certainly existed in prior ages around the world. Massive or intricate architectural, defensive, and transportation structures from prehistoric through classical and medieval times are cases in point. But “infrastructure” as an idea and as a literal word rose into prominence only after modern (especially twentieth-century) military, industrial, technological, organizational, and governmental systems normalized the notion that all things, especially engineered things and the populations that they are supposed to socially engineer, are structured as systems through planned and standards-based development, support, improvement, maintenance, protection, expansion, implementation, supply, and other means (repeating here in the nominative previously cited verb collocates of infrastructure).19 This is why, as before, we speak today not just of water but of water systems designed around technical standards, regulatory codes, and administrative procedures embedding infrastructure in systems and, seen in overview, enveloping systems of systems (e.g., not just plumbing systems but overall city planning).20 Borrowed from a late nineteenth-century French term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word “infrastructure” emerged in English c.1927 to designate “substructures” and “foundations” (initially military ones) that are “subordinate parts of an undertaking” (i.e., systems).21 Infrastructure thus correlates conceptually with modernity, understood as an ipso facto system from as early as the system thinkers and planners of the French Revolution or, later, of Marxian thought (according to which base of production is now indelibly tied to the idea of infrastructure) through the heyday of twentieth-century social systems theorists such as Talcott Parsons, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and, for large technical systems theory, Thomas P. Hughes.22

Against that background, the powerful, contrasting idea that today emerges from fusing the brokenness and relationality axioms in infrastructure studies may be put as follows: infrastructure is not just material systems functioning in social systems. It also embodies the relational differences in any social system that are profoundly dysfunctional and antisystemic—like Kristallnacht fractures in a pane of glass never meant by underlying or overlording social forces to be anything other than broken. In other words, infrastructure studies fuses the concepts of brokenness and social relationality to depict infrastructure as systematically antisystemic. Infrastructure is a system that works for some, but for that very reason, is broken for others. More cruelly, as in the case of city benches made with protrusions to prevent unhoused poor people from sleeping on them, it is designed to be broken for others.23 Systemically antisystemic infrastructure is an extreme example of what Foucault called a dispositif (usually translated as “apparatus”): “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble . . . of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” (Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 194). In the context of infrastructure studies, heterogeneous ultimately means—beyond temporary, makeshift patchworks of ill-sorted and, in the last instance, conflicting apparatuses—broken. For Foucault, after all, hetero-anything—e.g., “heterotopia” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”)—signals the break or fracture in any supposed unity or identity. Detecting the hetero in the homogeneous or universal is Foucault’s indictment of any fantasy that humanity can ever be systemically self-identical.

As infrastructure studies evolved alongside other humanities and social science approaches, “heterogeneous” next became “intersectional,” which has now become an important concern of infrastructure studies. At its inception in the 1990s and 2000s, infrastructure studies was not yet in dialogue with intersectionality theory as introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 article depicting differences between, and among, racial, ethnic, and gender groups—an article that itself was infrastructuralist at the key moment when, to define intersectionalism, it imagined in a strikingly detailed metaphor a “basement” with people “stacked” one atop another at different levels of disadvantage beneath a ceiling “hatch” (Crenshaw, 151–52). But the very fact that infrastructure studies from its onset emphasized socially relational differences—including the class differences implicit in Star’s example of infrastructure’s city planners versus plumbers—prepared for many of today’s works of intersectional infrastructuralism focused, for example, on feminism, race, ethnicity, postcolonialism, disability, and other areas related to social justice (see these and other relevant topics in Cistudies.org, “Bibliography”). Three recent examples of infrastructure studies can serve as a synecdoche: Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City and “The Banality of Infrastructure” (discussing water infrastructures that harmed marginalized citizens in Mumbai and Flint); Adrienne Brown’s The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (arguing “not only that race proved crucial to this architecture’s inception, but that the skyscraper also impeded the perception of race,” 2); and Ara Wilson’s “The Infrastructure of Intimacy” (discussing “intimacy” as “an analytical term in studies of gender, sexuality, kinship, or social relations” [247] in connection with the intimate infrastructures of public restrooms and mobile phones). The following statement in Wilson’s richly nuanced essay could be generalized to all such contemporary infrastructure studies simply by varying the adjective in its phrase “intimate relations” to extend to any mode of social, and thus necessarily also differential, relations: “As I hope the examples of toilets and phones have shown, infrastructure offers a useful category for illuminating how intimate relations are shaped by, and shape, materializations of power: it offers a vehicle for translating (operationalizing) broader theories of power, system, materiality, space, ideology, and discourse into observations of concrete situations” (263).

The emphasis on relational difference in contemporary infrastructure studies sets the frame for Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities. As indicated in the title of this new book in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, that frame is critical infrastructure studies. After infrastructure studies expanded beyond its initial STS orientation to an ensemble of disciplines and approaches, the ensemble as a whole increased in dialogic, intersectional, and therefore also critical potential. Any one infrastructural approach can now more readily debate the standpoints and emphases of another. Critical infrastructure studies today thus focuses on “topics, or difficulties” (in Star’s apt phrase) reflecting contesting views of what infrastructure is, where it is sited, how it is created and maintained, why it exists (and breaks down), whom it is for (or threatens), and if it is possible to envision better infrastructures—ones that are more just, caring, and sustainable.24

Recent infrastructural politics around the world have also raised the stakes terrifically. In North America, for example, U.S. President Donald Trump’s border wall, President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Keystone XL oil pipeline between Canada and the United States all incited controversy. In China, the immense Three Gorges Dam project and the recent overbuilding of housing infrastructure did the same. And in multinational or international regional areas such as Europe (where the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline from Russia became a vital concern), Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America (the scenes of the Chinese Belt and Road and Digital Silk Road initiatives), or maritime zones (such as in the case of China’s Maritime Silk Road initiative or Google’s Firmina open subsea cable between the eastern United States and Argentina), infrastructural politics scaled up to geopolitical stakes.25 Critical infrastructure studies focuses on these and many other infrastructures created in the continual clash—material, conceptual, social, and digital—between power and resistance, constraint and freedom, privilege and want, globalism and localism, design and mess, functionality and breakdown, engineering and repair, standardization and anomaly, technologically closed and open, and many other variances.

Intriguingly, critical infrastructure studies may also advance today’s discussion of the powers and limitations of critique itself. The gauntlet was recently thrown down on humanities and social science critique in a movement that may be called the “critique of critique,” as forcefully articulated by such thinkers as Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique and, a key influence on Felski, Bruno Latour in writings like “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” and “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto.’” As noted by Felski and others, the critique of critique actually originated as far back as Paul Ricouer’s Freud and Philosophy in 1970, with its meme about the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” or Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s landmark call for “surface reading” in 2009 and subsequent calls by others for noncritical modes of thought and affect in academic “reading.” What is of note in the context of infrastructure studies is that critique-of-critique’s arguments against critical close reading, reading under the surface, reading behind manifest content, and so on often rely on what are fundamentally spatial and material paradigms expressed through modifiers and prepositions such as those italicized here. In critique-of-critique, such paradigms can precipitate into full-blown mise-en-scènes of infrastructure.

While Felski’s primal scene in her incisive chapter “Digging Down and Standing Back” in The Limits of Critique is archaeological (“digging down” imagines an archaeological dig in which critics excavate buried meaning), the scene of Latour’s critique of critique is clearly infrastructural. In a Piranesi-like infrastructural reverie, for example, Latour in “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’” describes critique as a misdirected attempt to penetrate the “wall of appearances” of “composited” things (e.g., any technology) to an illusory foundation of reality. By contrast, he characterizes his own “compositionism” as acknowledging that reality is always constructed from chains of prior mediating agents and actions. The exact language in which he makes this argument stages what he terms the “wall of appearances” as a fully infrastructural version of Plato’s cave, complete with the tools needed for its construction or destruction (including Latour’s version of Heidegger’s “ready-to-hand” “hammer” in Being and Time):

It is really a mundane question of having the right tools for the right job. With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together. It is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw. Its limitations are greater still, for the hammer of critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of appearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when there is nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenly looks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath? (Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” 475)

In its metaphors of walls and destroyed walls, hammers and the holes that they make—and even in its prepositions (“behind,” “beneath”)—this passage may be paired with a film like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), in which infrastructure is not just the mise-en-scène but the main character.

Latour’s theory of compositionism (related to ANT) represents one of the major branches of STS. For that reason, remarking on it here closes the circuit opened by our introduction’s initial mention of the “knowledge infrastructures” branch of STS. Knowledge infrastructures are certainly “compositions” in Latour’s sense. But today, the acknowledgement that they are constructs all the way down (analogous to mythical “turtles all the way down”) just opens whole other circuits—other discussions in the ongoing contemporary reconsideration of the powers and limitations of critique. It is thus important to recognize, for example, that Latour’s call to “repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together” overlaps in its vocabulary with such recent areas of infrastructure studies as the “repair and care” movement (e.g., Jackson; Russell and Vinsel). Critical infrastructure studies is an experiment not just in critiquing-to-break (to show the antisystemic brokenness of the modern world of infrastructure) but also in critiquing-to-build-and-repair—that is, to make, remake, and make whole again. Critical infrastructure studies—to which the digital humanities (DH), the specific subject of this book, contributes—can be reparative in helping make critique itself whole again.

Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies

As reprised in the discussion thus far, infrastructure studies started in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when STS scholars began studying digital “knowledge infrastructures,” while in parallel historians of technology worked on “large technical systems.” Of course, that was also the period when the spread of personal computers in the workplace and home converged with the popularization of the internet to prompt a Cambrian explosion of networked digital media, platforms, and services. From the 2000s on, therefore, the STS infrastructure studies group increasingly discussed cyberinfrastructure—the term that the National Science Foundation’s Atkins report of 2003 introduced to refer to “computation, data, information, and networks” for the sciences (Atkins et al., 4); and that the Our Cultural Commonwealth report by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences of 2006 extended to the “organized use of networks and computation” in the humanities and social sciences (ACLS, 1).26 While the word “cyberinfrastructure” began to fall out of general use after 2007,27 the digital and networked research knowledge infrastructures that it announced expanded across the digital sciences (e.g., in so-called in silico medicine or data-sharing astronomy),28 digital social sciences (e.g., in research on the internet’s impact on politics),29 digital new media studies (e.g., in network critique),30 and—the particular domain of this book—in the digital humanities.

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities focuses on the long-standing but now-refreshed relation between DH and infrastructure studies. Even when after the 2000s, infrastructure studies widened to encompass many material, social, economic, epistemic, aesthetic, and other infrastructural topics, its original topic of knowledge infrastructures (and digital ones in particular) continued to be prominent. Attention to the digital was no doubt boosted by the sheer novelty at the time of digital and networked applications—a novelty that also led dialectically to pushback in such offshoots of STS infrastructure studies as the “repair and care” movement against the very notion of innovation in Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” style.31 But the outsize importance of the digital also owed much to how digital sensing, surveillance, control, communication, storage, analysis, and simulation technologies began to permeate the urban, transportation, and other systems paradigmatic of modern infrastructure so thoroughly that they seemed to become part of the very weave, or World Wide Web, of “postindustrialism,” “late capitalism,” and “late modernity.”32 If modern infrastructure was a “pillar” of modern systems (to cite an infrastructural metaphor that was central to the neoinstitutionalist approach to organization theory in the 1980s and 1990s), then digital infrastructure is the pillar (now called a “stack”) of late modernity as a digital system.33 Digital systems—whether as add-ons, extensions, or full-on “digital twins”34—became the peak of what James Beniger called the “control revolution,” Manuel Castells updated as the “network society,” and James Smithies further updated as “the digital modern.” Exemplary are “smart cities,” one of the topics of recent infrastructure studies (e.g., Karnoven et al.; Mattern). Smart cities refers to city infrastructures that are so inlaid with digital sensor and control systems that they are typically visualized in “cyberpunk” iconography as a ghostly (or “ghost in the shell”) wire-frame, virtual architecture superimposed over urban architecture.35

Against the backdrop of such digital infrastructural studies, Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities depicts DH both as a continuance of legacy infrastructure studies and as part of the renewal of that legacy in critical infrastructure studies.

Continuance is an important emphasis in this book because infrastructural thought and practice were central to DH from the first. Under its original name of humanities computing, DH was infrastructure studies avant la lettre.36 This was true even if at the time—for example, soon after the start of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in 1987 or of the first annual joint conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing & Association for Computers and the Humanities (ALLC-ACH) in 198937—there were few known connections in either direction between the humanities computing scholarly community and the STS circle that explicitly thematized the study of infrastructure. It was true because of DH’s long-standing hands-on thinking, as it might be called, about corpus construction, text-encoding and metadata standards, text-analysis tools, minimal computing, maker or builder studies, media archaeology, and the creation of DH labs, centers, and programs. The photo of a hard drive’s damaged, naked platter on the cover of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s influential media-archaeological book Mechanisms (2007) is perhaps perfectly emblematic of DH’s interest in infrastructure. So is the recent surge of writings about DH labs, which directly acknowledges the originating infrastructuralism of STS with its studies of labs, medical facilities, and other research environments.38

But the renewal of infrastructuralism is just as important an emphasis in this book. DH is an important contributor to the current evolution of infrastructure studies as critical infrastructure studies. Ironically, this is the case despite the fact that DH was first seen as critically naive in comparison to its sibling field, “new media studies.” “Where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?” it was asked.39 Typically, after all, new media studies faced outward from its base in academe to criticize digital society at large, critiquing digital and media technical infrastructures as the means toward that end. Exemplary are such branches of new media studies as social-media platform studies (e.g., Helmond, Nieborg, and van der Vlist; Lovink) and media infrastructure studies (e.g., Parks and Starosielski), where incisive infrastructural critique aimed ultimately to critique digital society’s overlords (e.g., Facebook or Google). By contrast, DH seemed at first not to have developed ways to merge its critique of academic technologies with cultural critique.40 DH appeared to be academically introverted, focusing on such scholarly infrastructural technical problems previously mentioned as corpus construction, text-encoding and metadata standards, text-analysis tools, and creating labs and centers.

Yet the critical potential of DH was definitely there, charging up in the academy as if in a battery.41 If DH focused on technologies of digital scholarship, that also meant that it could critique and change those technologies (and the academic practices that they reflected) in a hands-on way that new media studies in its early phases, commenting at a hands-off distance from the Silicon Valley empires and other regimes that it observed in fascinated horror, typically could not.42 From the beginning, for example, DH’s critical potential was evident in the passionate commitment of many digital humanists to developing scholarly platforms for collaboration and open access that circumvented, or simply ignored, the offerings of both the overlord FANG companies (an acronym originally encompassing Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google; since expanded to include firms like Apple) and the so-called EdTech industry.43

With regard to collaboration infrastructures, for instance, a notable case of do it yourself (DIY) in DH is the series of collaborative and open-comment forums and publishing platforms that originated in whole or part from the CUNY Academic Commons and ultimately resulted in Knowledge Commons (formerly named Humanities Commons) and the Manifold online publishing system (the digital platform of the Debates in Digital Humanities series).44 Another notable case is the Zotero bibliography platform from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, whose features include collaborative group libraries. Yet another example is the Mukurtu content management system (CMS), which was originally developed by the scholars Kimberly Christen and Craig Dietrich in collaboration with members of the Indigenous Warumungu community in Australia. Mukurtu is a unique platform that adapted the Drupal CMS for the purpose of sharing Indigenous cultural heritage according to “cultural protocols” based on “traditional knowledge” conventions permitting selective access to materials depending on a group’s understanding of who has culturally appropriate access (e.g., the public or only a member of the group, a woman, a man, or others).45 Mukurtu is a case study in alternatives to mainstream Western notions of collaboration and openness on the internet, which typically assume the dominance of a blend of liberal, libertarian, capitalist, or what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron term “Californian ideology” cultural protocols.

And with regard to open access infrastructures, breaking down the paywalls of closed publication empires has from the first been DH’s version of storming a university administration building in the 1970s. Just as during the French Revolution it was the ethos of power to the people that razed the national records in the Bastille and led to a new National Archives along with a whole new theory of archives (respect des fonds), so in DH it was knowledge to the people that led to the creation of open digital archives hardly recognizable as archives at all to professional archivists46—for example, archives practicing what, in an insightful article actually discussing the French Revolution, Jefferson Bailey (the Internet Archive’s director of archiving and data services) calls “disrespect des fonds.” (Chapter 6 in this book, by Martin Paul Eve, discusses what may be the ultimate example of disrespect des fonds: “shadow libraries.”47) One important difference from the French Revolution, however, was that DH sought less to raze the Bastilles of academic knowledge infrastructure—research libraries—than to collaborate with library and information science’s own progressive initiatives for open access, fair use (in U.S. copyright law), the extension of fair use to nonconsumptive data analytics, and so on.48

DH focused on critiquing knowledge infrastructures in its own academic backyard. But the ethos of those critiques cannot be truly understood unless seen as directed through the academy toward the larger society for which the academy serves both as tutor—a role that is so far from being only symbolic that it directly entrains hundreds of millions of students each year49—and, along with such other institutions as journalism and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—as guardian, watchdog, or, at minimum, alternative mode of work and governance. In other words, DH joins other academic fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences, in pursuing one of the most fundamental aspirations of the academy: to conduct scholarship in a manner that models how scholars believe society at large should ideally function to resolve difficult issues of fairness and truth. In this sense, the academy itself is for DH the “medium” for thinking about society; and digital academic infrastructures are thus DH’s equivalent of “new media studies.” After all, what philosophers of science call “epistemic virtues” (values for the conduct of scholarly knowledge, such as rationality, rigor, thoroughness, openness, and richness) are always also social virtues, especially when instituted in shared governance and other organizational forms of collaboration or openness, even if these themselves require vigilance, as in critical university studies.50 When digital humanists code or critique in the spirit of collaboration or openness, they are trying to change the Heideggerian “hammer” of digital technologies and its EdTech extensions into an infrastructure that is true not just to the institution but to the spirit of the humanities as it contributes to society. What would a humane, nuanced, supple, or empathetic hammer be? Such are questions for the digital humanities.

In short, DH’s role is to help shape digitally smart but also ethical academic infrastructures that can advance normative scholarly work while, through such work, critically transferring “the best,” and therefore not all, values and practices in both directions between higher education and today’s other powerful institutions in society: business (including big tech), law, medicine, government, media, and creative industries, among others. This is DH’s charge in helping higher education fulfill its general critical mission of being relationally different from other major social institutions, and not just a pale copy of them. DH develops and studies infrastructure as a standing reserve not only of instrumentalized and ordered technology designed for some master plan, but of technology in the service of different plans—which is to say, ultimately, of difference as itself a design principle. By calling on such digital-technology and DH principles for working across differences as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR); Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance); collaboration; public humanities; global humanities; feminism; postcolonialism; multilingualism; and so on,51 DH practices what artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and cultural critic Philip Agre influentially calls “critical technical practice.”

(Infra)structure of this Book

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities focuses on DH in relation to current critical infrastructure studies. In doing so, it builds on and accompanies other writings in DH, beginning with such relatively early works addressing DH infrastructure as Sheila Anderson’s “What Are Research Infrastructures?” (2013). Volumes of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series itself are important precedents, including Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (ed. Jentry Sayers, 2017), The Digital Black Atlantic (ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, 2021), and People, Practice, Power (ed. Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier, 2021).52 These and other books in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, along with their original calls for papers, addressed such topics as “digital humanities and its institutions and infrastructures” (McGrail, Nieves, and Senier, “Introduction”); DH’s “uneven distributions of [infrastructural] resources—on national, institutional, organizational, and cultural levels” (Gold and Klein); and makers’ or builders’ “conceptual matter” of “humanities scholarship as built, assembled, or constructed” (Sayers, “Introduction” and “CFP: Making Things and Drawing Boundaries”). Patrik Svensson’s long-standing focus on DH infrastructure is also notable, including his institutional work (e.g., directing Humlab at Umeå University), event organization (e.g., “Humane Infrastructures” at the University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA] in 2020 [“Curated Events”]), and scholarly writings (e.g., “The Humanistiscope: Exploring the Situatedness of Humanities Infrastructure” and Humane Infrastructures).53

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities also follows in the wake of many DH conferences and workshops on infrastructure studies in recent years, including the following:54

• Infrastructure | Space | Media, Umeå University (2012)
• The Frontiers of DH: Humanities Systems Infrastructure Workshop, University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2015)
• DH Infrastructure Symposium at UCLA (annual workshops started in 2015)
• Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities Panel, DH 2016 (2016)
• Interrogating Infrastructure Symposium, King’s College London (2016)
• Romanticism and Critical Infrastructures Studies Seminar, North American Association for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) conference (2018)
• Critical infrastructure Workshop, King’s Digital Lab, King’s College London (2018)
• Critical Infrastructure Studies Special Session, Modern Language Association convention, New York City (2018)
• Workshop on Humanistic Infrastructure, Stockholm (2018)
• Radical Transparency Infrastructure Design Workshop, King’s College London (2018)
• Public Humanities Infrastructure: A Post-Harvey Introduction to Critical Infrastructure Studies Panel, Rice University (2019)
• Humane Infrastructures, UCLA (2020)
• Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies Workshops coorganized by King’s Digital Lab, King’s College Department of Digital Humanities, and CIstudies.org (“Infrastructural Interventions”; “Interrogating Global Traces of Infrastructure”) (2021)

More generally, Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities builds on and helps consolidate work on such topics of DH critical infrastructure studies (some previously mentioned) as the following:

• Cultural heritage infrastructures (see, e.g., Benardou et al.)
• DH and media labs (e.g., Oiva and Pawlicka-Deger; Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka; and Pawlicka-Deger and Thomson)
• Environmental digital humanities (e.g., Baillot et al.; Miya, Rossier, and Rockwell; Ryan, Hearn, and Arthur; and Digital Humanities Climate Coalition)
• Feminist infrastructures (e.g., Brown et al.; McPherson; and D’Ignazio and Klein)
• Labor and infrastructure (e.g., Graban et al.)
• Maker and builder studies (e.g., Sayers) and experimental media archaeology (e.g., Fickers and van den Oever, Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory and “Experimental Media Archaeology”; and Heijden and Kolkowski)
• Minimal computing, or “computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors” (Minimal Computing)
• Open access (e.g., Eve; and Eve and Gray)
• Postcolonial and transnational digital infrastructures (e.g., Risam and Gairola; and Smithies, Flohr, Bala’awi et al.)
• Sustainable research infrastructures (e.g., Edmond and Morselli; Gourley and Viterbo; Smithies, Westling, Sichani et al. and Tucker)

To extend and innovate on such works and topics, Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities is organized into three sections with different emphases, as described next. Of course, as Bowker and Star demonstrated in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (an influential work of the STS and ethnography circles of infrastructure studies), classifying chapters or anything else involves unresolvable conflicts in understanding and priorities. It is useful to array chapters according to some scheme of difference. But overlapping themes and arguments among the chapters mean that it is disputable whether some chapters belong in one section versus another in the scheme. As editors of a volume in the DH field, indeed, we wondered whether computational modeling might assist as what would amount to a fourth editor, providing a different opinion about how the volume should be ordered. Indeed, we experimented with machine learning for this purpose, using topic modeling, K-means and dendrogram clustering, and other kinds of querying for similarity to explore lexical and thematic chapter groupings that might be a different way of “sorting things out.”55 For example, topic modeling showed that chapters 11 (Tsui and Chen), 2 (Brown), 5 (Pawlicka-Deger, Ciula, and Vieira), and 18 (Miller) are closely associated with a topic whose most frequent words are digital, project, platforms, platform, technology, software, institutional, press, services, and based—a similarity that suggests that these chapters could be the nucleus for a section in an alternative scheme for this book (whereas in the organizing scheme that we settled on, they are distributed across three sections). Or, again, K-means analysis (see Figure I.1) showed that the following chapters form distinct clusters:

• Chapters 3 (Montoya), 18 (Miller), and 19 (Booten)
• Chapters 1 (Beaulieu), 6 (Eve), and 14 (Patel, Caranto Morford, and Jacob)
• Chapters 4 (Hockenberry) and 7 (Cha and Miller)
• Chapters 2 (Brown), 8 (Wermer-Colan, Wythoff, Gomez, and Washington), and 12 (Verhoeven, Jones, Burrows, and Borda)

These groupings could also be the nuclei around which to accrete sections in an alternative version of this book. It would be intriguing to follow up with a close reading of the chapters involved to seek the significance of their lexical and thematic similarities that the computer noticed but that we as human editors did not, or that we unconsciously suppressed to bring forward other themes.

In the end, however, we did not pursue the machine learning exercise further because we had higher confidence in our judgment as domain experts in the DH field working with a small document set that we had read deeply (down to the level of “track changes” in word-processing programs). However, as scholarly books increasingly move to online platforms, there is no reason why it might not be good practice in the future to use computational modeling to provide readers with selectable playlists of different chapter orderings.

The following is the grouping of the chapters in this volume as settled on by its human editors.

Infrastructure Manifests

A distinctive feature of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities is that each chapter is accompanied by an “infrastructure manifest” (sometimes multiple ones for coauthored chapters), declaring the principal infrastructures behind that chapter’s creation or, in a few cases, that of the digital platforms, services, or tools that are a chapter’s topic. (Manifests can be accessed at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/critical-infrastructure-studies-and-digital-humanities/resource-collection/infrastructure-manifests. See the appendix, “Infrastructure Manifests,” for a fuller explanation.) Such infrastructures include unceded Indigenous land; natural resources; labor; and major platforms, networks, machines, tools, and institutional or other apparatuses. Akin in mission to the “datasheets for datasets” influentially proposed by Gebru et al. for documenting datasets, these manifests are offered to start DH along the path of evolving a shared protocol for declaring the infrastructures used in knowledge production. Of course, infrastructure manifests in this book do not offer definitive answers, as if there were only one set of infrastructures important for DH. They are less a mode of answering than of asking what the DH community and others represented in this volume think are key infrastructures to make “visible” (pace Star) as part of DH’s “object of study.”

Notes

1. 1. The STS circle of ethnographers and information scientists who inaugurated infrastructure studies beginning in the mid-1990s by studying organizational technologies, information science, and knowledge infrastructures include (alphabetically) Christine L. Borgman, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson, and Susan Leigh Star. For examples of works by these authors, see under each name in this chapter’s bibliography. In the present volume, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Arianna Ciula, and Miguel Vieira’s “Critical Studies of Tech Stacks: What Can Technologies Tell Us About a Lab Culture?” (chapter 5) draws in part on methods influenced by this STS circle, and STS more generally.

2. 2. For key or representative examples of LTS, see Hughes, Networks of Power and Rescuing Prometheus, and Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems.”

3. 3. Jane Bennett and Bill Brown wrote influentially on thing theory starting in the early 2000s. Relevant also are Bruno Latour’s writings roughly at the same time (1990s through 2000s) on the “Parliament of Things” (We Have Never Been Modern, 142–45) and Dingpolitik (“From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”). Latour’s STS work on things (“actor-network theory”) provides a bridge between the work of the STS infrastructure-studies group (cited previously) and thing theory. It should be noted, however, that there have been surprisingly few linkages between infrastructure studies and another important scholarly context for thinking about objects: object-oriented ontology (OOO) philosophy. An excellent introduction to, and reflection on, OOO to read alongside infrastructure studies is Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology. For other works on technological things and objects relevant to the notion of infrastructure, see, for example, Verbeek, What Things Do; Kroes, Technical Artefacts; and Rosenberger, “Technological Multistability and the Trouble with the Things Themselves.”

4. 4. For a bibliography of works in infrastructure studies organized topically in these and other areas, see CIstudies.org, “Bibliography” and “Primer.” (CIstudies.org is the website of the Critical Infrastructure Studies initiative.) Writings after the inaugural period of STS infrastructure studies that were influential in articulating infrastructuralism as a general approach include Brian Larkin’s work in anthropology; a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on infrastructuralism in literature (see the introductory article by Rubenstein, Robbin, and Beal); and Lisa Parks’s and Nicole Starosielski’s works on “media infrastructures” in media studies (e.g., Parks; Starosielski; and Parks and Starosielski). For an example of the study of historical infrastructures at the onset of the modern technological and industrial era, see Speitz.

5. 5. Cf., Urszula Pawlicka-Deger’s reflections on “the multiformity of infrastructure that makes infrastructure a powerful and engaging object with the embedded power to form and re-form social, cultural, and intellectual configurations” (“The Multiformity of Infrastructure”).

6. 6. An important recent example of the epistemic usage of the phrase object of study is John Guillory’s discussion in Professing Criticism of the historical and current confusion about the object of study of language and literary studies. Is the object of language and literary studies—as represented by the Modern Language Association (MLA), for example—language, literature, or society and culture? See the discussion in Guillory, 54 and passim on the “object of study” of modern language disciplines.

7. 7. Richard Rorty’s edited volume on The Linguistic Turn (1967) marked an early, influential use of the phrase “linguistic turn” to refer to the generalization of the paradigm of language. Jencks’s The Language of Post-modern Architecture is an example of the impact of the linguistic turn on architectural design.

8. 8. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 17. Rereading Heidegger’s essay today from the point of view of infrastructure studies brings into prominence its specifically infrastructural examples—for example, also on page 17, see the following observation about transportation infrastructure as a case of “standing-reserve”: “Yet an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation. For this it must be in its whole structure and in every one of its constituent parts, on call for duty, i.e., ready for takeoff.”

9. 9. The verbs in this sentence are among the most frequent collocates (among verbs) of infrastructure in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies)—a corpus-linguistics corpus from English-Corpora.org that “contains more than one billion words of text (25+ million words each year 1990–2019) from eight genres: spoken media, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, TV and movies subtitles, blogs, and other web pages.” Specifically, the top verb collocates (in order of frequency beginning with most frequent) are the following: build, support, provide, create, invest, rebuild, develop, spend, improve, require, destroy, maintain, repair, protect, establish, fund, upgrade, lack, fix, expand, finance, project, damage, strengthen, ensure, enable, target, house, modernize, dismantle, implement, restore, sustain, install, construct, enhance, supply, collapse, facilitate, accommodate, crumble, deploy. . . . English-Corpora.org’s other corpora (e.g., for British English) could be similarly explored for collocates.

10. 10. For a media-archaeological study of index-card systems exemplifying the “analog humanities,” see Kil, “Excavating Infrastructure in the Analog Humanities’ Lab” and “From the Digital to the Analog Humanities.”

11. 11. For an important STS study of the changing history of ideas about “objects” and “objectivity,” see Daston and Galison, Objectivity. For a recent media-archaeological and literary study of how complex the idea of “literalism” is, see Shoemaker.

12. 12. The word “composed” in this sentence alludes to Bruno Latour’s theory of “compositionism” (see, e.g., Latour, “On Technical Mediation” and “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’”)—a linkage to STS approaches that could be expanded in a fuller discussion of the relation of infrastructure studies to STS.

13. 13. Cf., Brown, “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily” (4).

14. 14. Cf., Rosenberger’s comment that “One way to move forward here is to consider how the aspects of technology articulated . . . are addressed by accounts that conceive of it in terms of a kind of fundamental relationality. A number of theoretical perspectives can be understood to subscribe to a ‘relational ontology,’ including feminist new materialism, actor-network theory, embodied and extended cognition, postphenomenology, and, more broadly speaking, critical theory and American pragmatism, among others. . . .” (377). See also McGrail, Nieves, and Senier, “Introduction”: “[infrastructure] is also profoundly relational. Seeing digital humanities infrastructure in this way—as a set of evolving relations and dependencies and not merely static resources—supports a critical digital humanities practice that acknowledges institutional constraints and engages in purposeful, reflexive action.”

15. 15. See also Star and Ruhleder’s “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure,” which Star’s “Ethnography of Infrastructure” cites. For a more recent discussion of the relationality of infrastructure in the digital humanities, see Pawlicka-Deger, “Infrastructuring Digital Humanities.”

16. 16. Bowker, another founding member of the original infrastructure studies STS group, coined as early as 1994 his phrase “infrastructural inversion” to describe how taken-for-granted infrastructure in the background can suddenly come into focus in the foreground (Science on the Run, 10 and passim). The concept and term “infrastructural inversion” is also important in another founding work of infrastructural studies of the 1990s: Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out (1999).

17. 17. See CIstudies.org, “Bibliography,” under the heading “Water.” Nikhil Anand’s writings on water, which make water infrastructures the basis for general theses about infrastructure, are exemplary.

18. 18. On infrastructure and modernity, see Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” esp. 186, 191.

19. 19. While the infrastructure concept arose most prominently and explicitly in the twentieth century (the word “infrastructure” originated in the context of military built structures in 1927 and according to the OED and Google Books, Ngram Viewer climbed steeply in usage in a general sense after 1960), principal elements of the concept such as standardization clearly descended from a somewhat earlier technological and industrial modernity—for example, from the nineteenth-century invention of standard-parts manufacturing (based on the measurement of parts against systems of “standards”). See Liu, “Transcendental Data,” 63–73, on standards-based industrial processes from the time of John Hall’s rifle works at Harpers Ferry in the nineteenth century through twentieth-century Taylorism and ultimately postindustrialism.

20. 20. For an example of how the standards, codes, permits, licenses, etc. together define a “water system,” see California State Water Resources Control Board, “What Is a Public Water System?”

21. 21. In full, the OED’s definition of infrastructure is as follows: “A collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking; substructure, foundation; spec. the permanent installations forming a basis for military operations, as airfields, naval bases, training establishments, etc.” A paradigmatically conjoined usage of infrastructure and system today is the title of the Infrastructure Systems program in Cornell University’s College of Engineering, which defines its subject in this way: “Infrastructure systems involves the design, analysis, and management of infrastructure supporting human activities, including, for example, electric power, oil and gas, water and wastewater, communications, transportation, and the collections of buildings that make up urban and rural communities.” The OED’s hierarchical notion of infrastructure as a system organized into “subordinate parts” is usefully expanded upon in the last sentence of Sheila Anderson’s important article, “What Are Research Infrastructures?,” which characterizes infrastructures nonhierarchically “as an ecosystem in which the component parts interact, shift and change in a constant process of engagement, adjustment, and readjustment” (21). Other important discussions in infrastructure studies of infrastructure as “systems” include the following. Star writes that “people commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates—railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires” (“Ethnography,” 380, emphasis added). Brian Larkin observes in “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure” that “what distinguishes infrastructures from technologies is that they are objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate, and when they do so they operate as systems” (329). He adds: “Placing the system at the center of analysis decenters a focus on technology and offers a more synthetic perspective, bringing into our conception of machines all sorts of nontechnological elements. . . . the focus is on system building” (330). For a “systems analysis” of humanities and digital humanities infrastructures, see chapter 5 of Smithies’s Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern, esp. pp. 118–123, on the historical, philosophical, and social science modes of systems-thinking that provide context for studying technological systems. Chapters in the present volume that turn crucially on the idea of “systems” and systematicity of one kind or another include those by Anne Beaulieu (chapter 1) and Matthew Hockenberry (chapter 4).

22. 22. For a sweeping survey, and unsparing critique, of modern systems theory across many fields and applications, see Lilienfeld, “Systems Theory as an Ideology.” Edwards’s “Infrastructure and Modernity,” which in part discusses large technical systems theory, fully embeds the concept of infrastructure within a systems view—as indicated by the essay’s subtitle: “Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.”

23. 23. See R. Baker’s “Broken Infrastructures, Invisible Subjects” for resources related to infrastructures designed to work against groups of people. An instance that Baker cites is infrastructure intended to discourage the presence of the unhoused or homeless. An intriguing artist’s project protesting such infrastructure that Baker mentions is Sarah Ross’s “Archisuits.” Archisuits are wearable outfits designed “for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles” so that, for example, they fit over, and allow the unhoused to sleep on, benches with protrusions that otherwise make it impossible to lie flat on them (Ross).

24. 24. Cf., Pawlicka-Deger, “Multiformity”: “Infrastructure is made up of social and technical components—community and platforms—and their interrelations disclose divergences and disagreements between them. The quality of infrastructure is built by making connections, enabling participation, and facilitating practices. These values prompt the question of the social side of infrastructure that discloses hidden interrelations between the system and society, such as who is connected, who is enabled to participate, and whose practices are facilitated. Infrastructure reveals a set of disturbing questions of inclusion/exclusion, connection/disconnection, and scaling up/down in the social configurations.” See also Harvey, Jensen, and Morita (quoted in Pawlicka-Deger): “The fact that infrastructure is a divergent phenomenon does not need to lead to mutual indifference among differently invested actors. To the contrary, as we see it, one of the most exciting things about the current STS and anthropological interest in infrastructure is that it draws into unfolding conversations an increasingly varied array of infrastructural actors materials, offering an ever-expanding range of resources for thinking and acting.”

25. 25. Infrastructure projects like these on the national and geopolitical scale are examples of the intended visibility of infrastructure that Larkin argues is a notable exception to Star’s rule that infrastructure is normally “invisible” (334–36). As Larkin puts it: “Invisibility is certainly one aspect of infrastructure, but it is only one and at the extreme edge of a range of visibilities that move from unseen to grand spectacles and everything in between” (336).

26. 26. For the work of the STS infrastructure studies circle on cyberinfrastructure, see, for example, Bowker, Edwards, Jackson et al., “The Long Now of Cyberinfrastructure”; and Bowker, Baker, Miller, et al., “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies.”

27. 27. As shown in Google Books Ngram Viewer, cyberinfrastructure spiked sharply upward in usage during 2000–2007 before appearing to fall off in frequency.

28. 28. For a definition and history of in silico medicine, see Insigneo Institute (University of Sheffield), “About in Silico Medicine.” For the importance of data sharing in contemporary astronomy, see Pepe et al.

29. 29. For a representative early instance of the digital social sciences, see the work of Bruce Bimber (e.g., “Information and Political Engagement in America”). For an overview on the digital social sciences in relation to the digital humanities, see Spiro.

30. 30. Manovich’s The Language of New Media is an early, influential work on new media studies. The Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam is an early example of new media studies’ interest in network critique.

31. 31. Exemplary of “repair and care” studies are works by Steven J. Jackson; and Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel. “Move fast and break things” was the early internal motto of Facebook. With regard to the latter, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg noted a change in 2014 that bears interestingly on the topic of infrastructure: “We’ve changed our internal motto from ‘Move fast and break things’ to ‘Move fast with stable infrastructure’” (Levy).

32. 32. Works such as Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990) and Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) use the terms postmodern, postindustrial, late capitalist, and late modernity to designate different but overlapping social, economic, and cultural or aesthetic features of the late twentieth (and now early twenty-first) century.

33. 33. The infrastructural metaphor of pillar became well-known in neoinstitutionalist work on the sociology of organizations when W. Richard Scott in 1995 introduced his analytic of “the three pillars of institutions” (the “regulative,” “normative,” and “cultural-cognitive”) that make institutions out of organizations (Scott, 47–71). Refocusing on digital society mutates such metaphors as pillars into ones like stacks based on computer-programming and network architectures. An extreme version of the latter metaphor is Benjamin H. Bratton’s universalizing theory of the world and society as what he calls (always with initial caps) The Stack.

34. 34. Used to facilitate design, testing, and manufacture, “a digital twin is a digital representation of a physical object, person, or process, contextualized in a digital version of its environment” (McKinsey & Company, “What Is Digital-Twin Technology?”).

35. 35. A typical visualization of smart cities in this style is the image by metamorworks (Getty Images) used in Mondschein, Clark-Ginsberg, and Kuehn’s post about smart cities on the Rand Blog. Such visualizations are the descendants of fictional cyberpunk depictions of urban spaces that originated in the mid-1980s in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner film and William Gibson’s Neuromancer novel. Gibson’s novel explicitly foreshadowed the smart-city imaginary in its now canonical metaphor of cyberspace as “city lights receding”: “Cyberspace. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .” (51; second ellipses are Gibson’s). “Ghost in the shell” alludes to a Japanese cyberpunk story and its offshoots that spread internationally from manga to television, films, video games, and other media. The main character in the fiction franchise is a person whose mind is transplanted as a cyberbrain into a full-body cyborg prosthesis. See Wikipedia, “Ghost in the Shell,” May 1, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ghost_in_the_Shell&oldid=1288199461.

36. 36. Previously referred to as humanities computing, DH took its new name, digital humanities, in the 2000s. The rebranding is usually traced to the publication in 2004 of A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth.

37. 37. The first joint ALLC-ACH conference occurred in 1989 under the name “16th International ALLC Conference and 9th ICCH” and focused on the theme of “The Dynamic Text.” ALLC-ACH conferences later became known as today’s annual DH conferences with calendrically iterated names such as “DH 2024.” (Thanks to respondents on the Humanist list, including Willard McCarty, Geoffrey Rockwell, John Bradley, Maurizio Lana, Max Kemman, and Manfred Thaller, for their assistance in confirming the title and date of the first joint ALLC-ACH conference. See Alan Liu, “Re: [Humanist] 37.367: name of the first ALLC/ACH conference,” Humanist, January 4, 2024, 18:12:47, archived in “Humanist Archives: Jan. 5, 2024, 8:31 a.m. Humanist 37.369,” https://dhhumanist.org/volume/37/369/.)

38. 38. For the original work of the STS infrastructure studies circle on labs and related research, medical, and other facilities, see, for example, Star and Ruhleder (who studied genetics research facilities) and Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out (especially the chapters on nurses in medical organizations). Recent writings in DH about labs include the special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on “Lab and Slack” (see the introduction by Oiva and Pawlicka-Deger); Pawlicka-Deger and Thomson’s Digital Humanities and Laboratories (2023); and other work by Pawlicka-Deger and her colleagues (see Pawlicka-Deger in this chapter’s bibliography). See also Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka’s work on labs in media archaeological and DH contexts: The Lab Book (2022). In the current volume, Pawlicka-Deger, Ciula, and Vieira, “Critical Studies of Tech Stacks: What Can Technologies Tell Us About a Lab Culture?” (chapter 5) is a new instance of scholarship about DH labs that makes KDL its case study. Additional analyses of KDL can be found in Smithies and Ciula, “Humans in the Loop: Epistemology & Method in King’s Digital Lab” (2020); and Smithies, Ffrench, and Ciula, “Droit de cité: The Digital Lab as Digital Milieu” (2024).

39. 39. See an early statement on this by Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”

40. 40. For examples of previous writings by the present authors themselves contributing to this perception of DH, see not just Liu’s “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” (cited in note 39), but Smithies, The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern and “The Dark Side of DH”; and Smithies et al., “Droit de cité: The Digital Lab as Digital Milieu.”

41. 41. This argument about DH reflects a reconsideration and restatement by one of the editors of this volume, Alan Liu, of his essay of 2012: “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”

42. 42. Recent projects by media infrastructures scholars such as Nicole Starosielski contradict the simplification that new media studies approaches need to be at a distance or be hands-off from making an impact outside the academy. Starosielski’s work, for example, increasingly involves working with and in relation to industry to influence technological development. See, for example, the Sustainable Subsea Networks research initiative that she coleads, which is an international “academic-industry partnership.”

43. 43. The digital humanities community diverged early from the “computers and composition” and education studies communities, which have been more aware of and engaged with EdTech. Thus, there have been relatively few direct engagements in the DH field itself (in its projects, events, and writings) with such associations concerned with EdTech as EDUCAUSE, the nonprofit for “technology, academic, industry, and campus leaders” dedicated to “the strategic use of technology and data to further the promise of higher education” (EDUCAUSE, “About EDUCAUSE”). (Some DH scholars, however, have participated in authoring informative writings about DH for EDUCAUSE; see, for instance, Dombrowski and Lippincott; Lippincott et al.) DH has also rarely engaged with the work of noted critics of EdTech, such as Audrey Watters (see, e.g., The Monsters of Education Technology).

44. 44. Thanks to Matthew K. Gold for confirming the history by which the CUNY Academic Commons descended through Commons in a Box to MLA Commons and Humanities Commons (later renamed Knowledge Commons) (personal communication, December 27, 2019). On the origin of the CUNY Academic Commons, see Gold and Otte. Manifold originated in a collaboration between the CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Scholarship Lab and the University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding (Manifold, “A Brief History”).

45. 45. On Mukurtu and cultural and knowledge protocols, see Mukurtu CMS, “Our Mission”; and Christen, “Does Information Really Want to Be Free?” See also discussions of Mukurtu by Shepard, and by Machulak. In the present volume, see chapter 12 by Deb Verhoeven, Mike Jones, Toby Burrows, and Ann Borda, “Reproducibility and Contestation in Humanities Digital Infrastructure,” for an extended discussion of Mukurtu.

46. 46. See Kate Theimer for the bemused reflections of an archivist on what can appear to be the complete disconnect between established notions of an “archive” and DH’s “break-all-rules” notion of archives.

47. 47. In general, Eve’s chapter in this volume and his other work on open access (e.g., Open Access and the Humanities) show how open-access issues continue to be formative for DH.

48. 48. For explanations of the nonconsumptive use of copyrighted materials for data analytics, see HathiTrust; and Samberg and Hennesy.

49. 49. In 2024, “254 million students are enrolled in universities around the world—a number that has more than doubled in the last 20 years and is set to expand” (UNESCO). For example, 15 percent of the U.S. population were higher education students in 2024 (Hanson).

50. 50. On epistemic virtues, see, for instance, Peels. For examples of “critical university studies,” see the book series of that name from Johns Hopkins University Press (Williams and Newfield).

51. 51. For the FAIR principles, see the report of the ALLEA E-Humanities Working Group (Harrower et al.). For the CARE principles, see Carroll, Garba, Figueroa-Rodríguez et al. Many of the other principles mentioned are represented in the present volume (see the description of chapters that follows).

52. 52. The volume edited by McGrail, Nieves, and Senier focuses on what its “Introduction,” which contains extensive discussion of infrastructure, calls the “human side of digital humanities . . . infrastructure” (e.g., on what one of the book’s sections titles “Human Infrastructures: Labor Considerations and Communities of Practice”).

53. 53. Svensson’s book, Humane Infrastructures, is now published but was still forthcoming from MIT Press at the time the present book was written and completed.

54. 54. These are among the events currently known to the authors of this chapter, who participated in or organized some of them. The following are URLs for the events’ websites or materials: https://patriksv.com/curatorship/#infrastructure; https://web.archive.org/web/20151116061420/http://dh.canterbury.ac.nz/blog/2015/11/10/the-frontiers-of-dh-humanities-systems-infrastructure/; https://humtech.ucla.edu/symposium/; https://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/233; https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M4ofHwM7exM9qnVdIx4LZbLsi3s-AFoA124r0L-pvBA/edit?usp=sharing; https://cistudies.org/events/romanticism-and-critical-infrastructure-studies/; https://cistudies.org/events/romanticism-and-critical-infrastructure-studies/; https://cistudies.org/wp-content/uploads/critical-infrastructure-workshop-march-29-2018.pdf; https://criticalinfrastructure.hcommons.org/; https://patriksv.com/curatorship/#huminfra; https://cistudies.org/events/radical-transparency-infrastructure-design-workshop/; https://cistudies.org/events/public-humanities-infrastructure-a-post-harvey-introduction-to-critical-infrastructure-studies/; https://patriksv.com/curatorship/#humaneinfrastructures; https://cistudies.org/events/digital-humanities-critical-infrastructure-studies-workshop-series/; https://cistudies.org/events/digital-humanities-critical-infrastructure-studies-workshop-series/infrastructural-interventions/; https://cistudies.org/events/digital-humanities-critical-infrastructure-studies-workshop-series/interrogating-global-traces-of-infrastructure/.

55. 55. Treating the chapters in this volume as whole documents (with a stopwords list applied), we conducted MALLET LDA topic modeling for 50 topics; and we used the Lexos tool (Kleinman, LeBlanc, and Zhang) to conduct K-means clustering visualized in two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional (3D), and Voronoi space, and also to perform a dendrogram analysis. More extensive exploration would require iterative experimentation with different modeling parameters, “chunk” sizes of the documents, stopwords, etc. Word embedding analysis could also usefully be added as a method. Readers of this volume can explore an elementary topic model of the chapters by going to the digital resources for this chapter at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/critical-infrastructure-studies-and-digital-humanities/resources?tag=introduction and downloading a .zip file. Ater extracting the compressed .zip file, opening the “all_topics.html” file in the “output_html” subfolder will show a web page with an interactive view of the topic model. Each of the 50 topics is represented by a clickable list of the most frequent words in a topic. Clicking on a topic’s list will show a ranked list of the chapters most associated with that topic. Clicking on one of the chapters will then show other topics associated with that chapter. Readers can also use the Lexos suite of tools to explore this volume’s chapters by going to this chapter’s digital resources at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/critical-infrastructure-studies-and-digital-humanities/resources?tag=introduction, downloading a .zip file with Lexos data preloaded, and after decompressing the file, inputting it into Lexos’s “upload” screen at http://lexos.wheatoncollege.edu/upload. The workspace.lexos file contains the cleaned and stopworded text of this book’s chapters, accompanied by Lexos settings and options. Loading it in Lexos reproduces the editor’s workspace for exploring the chapters in Lexos.

56. 56. In the present volume, see also the beginning of Lucie Kolb’s chapter 15, “Making Infrastructure Writable,” for a general discussion of interfaces.

57. 57. The Twine narrative in Patel, Caranto Morford, and Jacob’s chapter 14, “Resisting Bring Your Own Infrastructure in Digital Humanities Learning Spaces,” can be downloaded as a web page or as a Twine file by searching for the word “Twine” among this book’s digital resources at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/critical-infrastructure-studies-and-digital-humanities/resources. A static text version is also included in that chapter.

58. 58. See the CIstudies.org, “Bibliography,” under “Transportation” (https://cistudies.org/critical-infrastructures-bibliography/ci-bibliography-transportation/)for examples of infrastructure studies works on shipping containers (e.g., Klatskin; Klose; Martin; and Schwarzer) and under “Materials” (https://cistudies.org/critical-infrastructures-bibliography/ci-bibliography-materials/) for works on concrete (e.g., Forty; Gandy; and Idorn).

Bibliography