events

Interrogating Global Traces of Infrastructure

Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies Workshop Series

Organised by King’s Digital Lab, King’s College Department of Digital Humanities, and Critical Infrastructures Studies Initiative (cistudies.org)

Lead organizer: Urszula Pawlicka-Deger

18 November 2021

This series of meetings aims to enliven discussion about infrastructure in the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences as a contribution to the emerging field of Critical Infrastructure Studies. The second workshop in the series brings together leading thinkers in Digital Humanities, Social Sciences, Digital Media, and Information Studies to discuss practices of interrogating global topographies of knowledge, data, and IT infrastructures and their influence on local social, economic, and research conditions.

The workshop will take place on the Microsoft Teams platform. (How to join a Teams meeting.) Registration for this event is open on Eventbrite:

The first workshop in June 2021 explored the fragility and faultiness of infrastructures that require scholarly intervention at individual, social, and planetary scales. However, interventions at local levels require an awareness of the relationship of infrastructure to global political and economic dynamics. A good example is Google’s plan to build a new underwater cable between the U.S. and Argentina to augment the company’s existing cable investments in the region and call it the Firmina cable (named after Brazilian abolitionist and author Maria Firmina dos Reis). Every day brings new reminders about how we are all part of a larger political and economic infrastructural system. The Covid-19 pandemic has explicitly shown how the concepts of globality and locality are two sides of the same coin. It recalls the famous words by Susan Leigh Star that “One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic or difficulty.”

In this second workshop, we seek to discuss the global dimensions of infrastructure – scale, flow, accessibility, durability, and transparency – and their impact on localized socio-technical practices. This complex topic touches on many aspects of Critical Infrastructure Studies as a practice, including platformization, global supply chains, public infrastructures, distributed labor, automatization, cloud computing, environment, and the politics of archives. These pressing issues are nontrivial methodologically. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure from a global perspective are suggested by the following questions: How can we reveal the global traces of infrastructures in our daily work? How can local case studies be scaled up? What does it mean to stusdy infrastructures at a distance? What is the best practice to obtain and process large quantities of data? How can we identify the “infrastructural endpoints” – the geographical, social, and economic points of disintegration of the global socio-technical system? And, perhaps most important: How can we contest something that happens at a global scale? What can scholars as individuals do to interrogate and envision better global infrastructures?

Agenda

18 November – 17.00 – 20.15 (UK time)

17.00 – 17.10

Introduction by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, King’s College London, UK

17.10 – 18.10

Panel discussion: Geoffrey C. Bowker (University of California, Irvine, US), Paul N. Edwards (Stanford University, US), Jennifer Gabrys (University of Cambridge, UK), and Noortje Marres (University of Warwick, UK) – (chair: Jonathan Gray)

18.10 – 18.15 Break

18.15 – 19.20
Session I (chair: James Smithies)

• Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles, US – “Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Understanding Supply-Chain Infrastructure”
• Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands – “Platformization: The role of business partners in infrastructure building”
• Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University, Australia – “Automating Geopolitics: Standardizing Technical Knowledge in Warehousing Industries”

19.20 – 19.25
Break

19.25 – 20.10
Session II (chair: Urszula Pawlicka-Deger)

• Shatha Mubaideen, Council for British Research in the Levant, UK – “MaDiH: Mapping Digital Cultural Heritage in Jordan”
• Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo, Canada – “Building Sustainable Web Archive Analysis Infrastructure: The Archives Unleashed Project”

20.10 – 20.15
Conclusion

You can find more details on the Critical Infrastructures Studies.org website: https://cistudies.org/events/digital-humanities-critical-infrastructure-studies-workshop-series/infrastructural-interventions/

The workshop is part of the MSCA project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 891155.

Infrastructural Interventions

Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies Workshop Series

Organised by King’s Digital Lab, King’s College Department of Digital Humanities, and Critical Infrastructures Studies Initiative (cistudies.org)

Lead organizer: Urszula Pawlicka-Deger

21-22 June 2021

The Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies Workshop Series aims to enliven discussion about infrastructure from the perspective of Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, as a contribution to the emerging field of Critical Infrastructure Studies. The first workshop in the series, “Infrastructural Interventions,” brings together leading thinkers in Digital Humanities (DH) to critically interrogate the economic, political, and socio-technical dimensions of contemporary infrastructure. The workshop will take place on the Microsoft Teams platform. (How to join a Teams meeting.) Registration for this event is open on Eventbrite:

The growing body of literature on the concept of infrastructure — in science and technology studies, media studies, cultural studies, and DH — prompts questions about why infrastructure is essential for studying people’s practices, what kinds of subjects are embedded in infrastructural systems, and, in particular, how the world can be transformed through infrastructural interventions. A focus on infrastructure reveals the materiality of practices, as a set of conditions that are laid down by various actors: academic institutions, cultural units, technology companies, publishing houses, and governmental bodies. Surfacing the relationships between these heterogeneous entities can give us an insight into the manufacture of substrates that are not fixed, but relational objects. Infrastructure is an articulation of materiality that is constantly in formation across space and time, as Nikhil Anand et al. argued in The Promise of Infrastructure (2018). A thing is therefore in the process of becoming infrastructure and composed of socio-technical assemblages that emerge from tensions between institutional actors, policies, and knowledge practices. These tensions — expressed as a clash between functionality and sustainability, standardisation and resistance to universality, open and closed technologies — located in infrastructure make it a valuable object of critical inquiry. DH can contribute to debates about modern infrastructure by offering unique humanities-centred theoretical and practice-led analyses of infrastructure and possessing the capacity to unlock a range of technical, socio-cultural, and political perspectives.

In this workshop, DH theorists interrogate the nature and fragility of infrastructure at individual, social, and planetary scales, and attempt to reconfigure their nature from social justice, feminist and decolonial perspectives. The following questions will guide us through the discussion: How, precisely, did our contemporary digital infrastructure evolve? How are different actors challenging, contesting and creating alternatives to official data infrastructures? How can DH infrastructure be informed by an analysis of power—and even actively challenge existing power imbalances? How might DH infrastructure reject the hierarchical and other divisions that currently structure DH work? How can digital humanists reimagine and rebuild the world differently through infrastructure?

Agenda

21 June, Monday – 17.00 – 20.00 (UK time)

17.00 – 17.10 Introduction by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, King’s College London, UK

17.10 – 17.50 Keynote by Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara, US – “Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies: An Overview,” 40min (chair: James Smithies)

Abstract: In this talk, Alan Liu provides an introduction to “critical infrastructure studies” and the place of the digital humanities in it. What have been the main approaches to infrastructure that today make the topic of such compelling socio-political, technological, media-informatic, cultural, historical, and artistic interest across the disciplines? How are the digital humanities positioned in relation to those approaches; and what is “critical” about that relation? Useful links for citations and other material mentioned in the talk:

• CIstudies.org Bibliography: bit.ly/cistudies_biblio

• “CI Studies Primer”: bit.ly/cistudies_primer

• Syllabus for Alan Liu’s 2020 graduate seminar on “Critical Infrastructure Studies”: bit.ly/cistudies_course2020

17.50 – 18.05 Discussion

18.05 – 18.10 Break

18.10 – 19.00 Session (chair: Urszula Pawlicka-Deger)

• Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University, US – “Revitalizing the ARC Infrastructure through Linked Open Data”
• Matthew K. Gold, CUNY Graduate Center, US – “An Open Opportunity: Free Software, Community-Supported Infrastructure, and the People’s University”
• Susan Brown, University of Guelph, Canada – “(Re:)platforming”

19.00 – 19.20 Discussion

19.20 – 19.25 Break

19.25 – 19.55 Projects discussion

This session will be devoted to the presentation and discussion of infrastructure-focused DH projects. How can DH projects (e.g., digital archives, collections and tools) address critical and social issues through the perspective of infrastructure? What are the project’s main contributions to Critical Infrastructure Studies?

• Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) – Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University, US (https://arc.dh.tamu.edu)
• Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) – Mihaela Ilovan, CWRC, University of Alberta, Canada (http://cwrc.ca)
• CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) – Stephen Brier and Chloe Smolarski, CDHA, City University of New York, US (https://cdha.cuny.edu)
• Enslaved.org – Dean Rehberger, Matrix, Michigan State University, US (https://enslaved.org)
• Humanities Networked Infrastructure: HuNI, Australia – Toby Burrows, University of Western Australia, Australia (https://huni.net.au)
• Ticha Project – Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Haverford College, and Felipe H. Lopez, Haverford College Libraries and the pueblo of San Lucas Quiaviní, Oaxaca (https://ticha.haverford.edu)

All projects will be published on a YouTube channel of CIstudies.org Initiative. Check out for the above projects and more:

• BlackWords: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writing and Storytelling – AustLit: Discover Australian Stories, Australia (https://www.austlit.edu.au/blackwords)

19.55 – 20.00 Conclusion

22 June, Tuesday – 17.00 – 19.10 (UK time)

17.00 – 17.05 Introduction by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, King’s College London, UK

17.05 – 17.50 Session 1 (chair: Urszula Pawlicka-Deger)

• Lauren F. Klein, Emory University, US – “What Does Feminist DH Infrastructure Look Like?”
• Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico – “The Fragility of Data and the Right to Infrastructures”
• Jonathan Gray, King’s College London, UK – “Missing Data and Making Data: Data Infrastructural Interventions”

17.50 – 18.10 Discussion

18.10 – 18.15 Break

18.15 – 18.45 Session 2 (chair: Arianna Ciula)

• James Smithies, King’s College London, UK – “Rewinding our Assumptions: Digital Infrastructure as Emergent Phenomena”
• David M. Berry, University of Sussex, UK – “Towards Critical Digital Humanities: Explainability and Interpretability as Critical Infrastructure Practice”

18.45 – 19.05 Discussion

19.05 – 19.10 Conclusion

You can find more details and abstracts on the Critical Infrastructures Studies.org website: https://cistudies.org/events/digital-humanities-critical-infrastructure-studies-workshop-series/infrastructural-interventions/

The workshop is part of the MSCA project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 891155.