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Infrastructural Interventions
“Infrastructural Interventions” is the first workshop in the 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). The event brings together leading thinkers in Digital Humanities to critically interrogate the socio-technical dimensions of infrastructure. The workshop will take place on 21-22 June 2021 on the Microsoft Teams platform. Please find out more in “Events” section and register now!
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Infrastructure, connection and global digital humanities
Below, you can find slides presentation for a conference talk given by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger at the Global Digital Humanities Symposium organised by Michigan State University, US. More details can be found on the MSU Global DH website here.
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The multiformity of infrastructure
Following the connections between knowledge, technology and practices means approaching infrastructure: the socio-technical assemblages that underpin everyday work. Theorists of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown that infrastructure holds the promise to unlock tensions and complexities in the process of knowledge production. As I am thinking more about how to approach infrastructure and incorporate it into my research, I find myself struggling with the identification of infrastructure (Is this infrastructure?). I am currently organizing workshops on Digital Humanities (DH) approaches to the subject of infrastructure and seeking to identify various DH projects as and on infrastructure. It is not straightforward, however, to decide if a particular project is infrastructure or can operate as infrastructure. Besides, I am coordinating the category of Digital Humanities in the extensive bibliography of the Critical Infrastructure Studies initiative that aims to gather resources on the topic of infrastructure across various contexts and disciplines. As road and pipes are easily identified as the examples of infrastructure, it is difficult to define and conceptualise digital objects as infrastructure. It can also be challenging to categorize scholarly resources due to the topic related to infrastructure. The CIStudies.org offers a rich taxonomy and develops into a great database on infrastructure studies across fields.
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Laboratory ethnography during a pandemic: On temporality, instability and co-production
A laboratory ethnography is a method of studying scientific workplaces to understand how scientific knowledge is constructed within a complex interweaving of social, material, and discursive relations. The method developed within laboratory studies (Knorr Cetina, 1995) emerged in Science and Technology Studies in the 1970s and 1980s. The observations and discourse analysis of scientific practices were conducted based on case studies of neuroendocrinology (Bruno Latour), molecular biology (Karin Knorr Cetina), and high energy physics laboratories (Sharon Traweek). The fieldwork of laboratory practice means that researchers are physically immersed in day-to-day activities to observe social interactions, the structural forms of work, and the movements of knowledge and skills. The immersion allows them to identify habits and patterns in routine practices. The co-location approach – being with research participants in the same place – has been identified as the main feature of laboratory ethnography. However, what if the co-location is not feasible?
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What is happening behind the text?
The study of humanities knowledge creation means to detect the process of reasoning that leads to making a claim translated into the text – the final product of humanities works – and also to go behind the text and reveal the mechanism and factors that leads to its formation. This, in turn, takes us to the messy and uncomfortable world of knowledge production and its power dynamics that influence the way we access resources, make our arguments, and articulate them. Continue reading...