Infrastructure as the Origin of Inequities - DH Infra
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Global Digital Humanities Symposium
Michigan State University, U.S.
14 April 2021
Infrastructure as the Origin of Inequities
A Case of Global Digital Humanities
Dr Urszula Pawlicka-Deger
Marie Curie Research Fellow
King’s College London
pawlickadeger.com | dhinfra.org
The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under grant agreement No 891155.
1
Outline:
1. Methodological introduction
2. Call for infrastructural intervention
3. Connection – the social side of infrastructure
4. Infrastructuring Digital Humanities
2
The COVID-19 pandemic provides a
good context for the discussion about the
global distribution of infrastructure. The
coronavirus lockdown – that has forced
society to shift everyday life to online
spaces - has reminded us that we are all
connected and that different time zones
could be the only barriers between us.
Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on3 Unsplash
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that the
current obstacles to global connectivity are much
more complex than just coordinating events across
multiple time zones. It has become a question of
social justice, privilege, and inequality. 4
1. Methodological introduction
o Science and technology studies
o Digital humanities theory
http://arounddh.org 5
Science and technology studies
• Infrastructure is not a fixed and neutral construction
but rather a complex socio-material thing that is
made up of tensions and agreements between
actors.
• The infrastructural approach provides a useful
analytical tool to trace the epistemic, technological
and social connections and interrogate power
dynamics at a global and local scale.
• Exploring technical details of infrastructure
requires, however, to disclose and understand
the broad conceptual social implications of
infrastructure that can heighten a sensitivity
toward ‘how we classify the contents of the world,
the ontological politics implicated in such
ordering work, the epistemic and material
infrastructures built to establish new social orders’
(Felt et al., 2017; 23).
Photo by Fré Sonneveld on Unsplash 6
Digital humanities
• DH have discussed infrastructure in many respects
informed by the Atkins report on cyberinfrastructure
for e-science (Atkins et al., 2003) and the Cultural
Commonwealth report of the American Council of
Learned Societies (ACLS, 2006). These reports have
introduced infrastructure as a technical thing that
engages tools, services and resources for digital
research engagement.
• Infrastructure is however a relational concept that
can unpack the broad range of social complexity
(Liu, 2018).
• Bringing conceptual STS and anthropological
perspectives of infrastructure to the DH debate to
show that the ‘promise of infrastructure’ (Anand et
al., 2018) to reimagine and rebuild the world
differently lies in the critical act of interrogating the
components of infrastructure and reconstructing
their configurations. The Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory at Yale University Library under the
construction, https://twitter.com/yaledhlab/status/10323457433261096967
2. Call for infrastructural intervention
Kathleen Fitzpatrick stressed the role of the social dimensions that include participation in
collaborative and collective projects. At the same time, these difficulties concern technical
aspects pointed out by Alan Liu, such as the fact that technology, platforms, and methods
can contribute to the understanding of diversity.
attitudes tools
collaboration software cloud
policy
SOCIAL TECHNICAL
practices
standards instruments security
budget Digital humanities are storage
happening at the level of
socio-technical infrastructure
8
The study of infrastructure in DH:
1. Toward Critical Infrastructure Studies (2018) by Alan Liu – It presents an agenda for
examining infrastructure through the lens of digital humanities. It is an important contribution
to the field because it grounds the investigation of infrastructure in the experience of culture.
2. Towards a Systems Analysis of the Humanities (2017) by James Smithies – It shows how
important is to understand the global system of cyberinfrastructure because it determines the
computationally intensive methods, and thereby affects the nature of digital knowledge.
The Critical Infrastructures Studies collective: https://cistudies.org
9
3. Enacting Open Scholarship in Transnational Contexts (2019) by David Wrisley – It provides
insight into the regional development of digital humanities practices in Arab countries in the
context of the globalized academic environment. Wrisley addressed the question of how to
more widely implement digital and open scholarly practices in the Arab region, and by doing
so, revealed technical and sociocultural divergences resulting from this incorporation.
4. Digital Humanities on the Ground: Post-Access Politics and the Second Wave of Digital
Humanities (2019) by Nishant Shah – It critically examines the role of the digital humanities in
the face of political agitation in the city of Ahmedabad that led to an unprecedented Internet
shutdown in the entire state of Gujarat in 2015. Shah introduced the idea of a ‘disconnected
subject’, defining it as a ‘subject who has all the rights of access and visibility but will be
controlled, contained, and censored through digital disconnectedness and interruption’ (2019).
103. Connection
The development of the inclusive and diverse global
digital humanities requires a deep understanding of
infrastructural affordances and constraints on ‘being
connected’. To become included in the global system
of knowledge, one must have access to solid technical
infrastructures that are entangled with political,
economic, and social influences. The expansion of
infrastructure raises a question of connectivity: Which
aspect of infrastructure needs to be expanded to
enable communities to be connected and included?
Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash
11Open Infrastructure Map (https://openinframap.org)
122
1
1. centerNet. An International Network of Digital Humanities Centers.
https://dhcenternet.org
2. Pawlicka-Deger, U. (2019) (Digital) Humanities and Media Labs around the
world, an interactive map. http://pawlickadeger.com/humanities-labs/
3. Terras, M. (2012) Infographic: Quantifying Digital Humanities,
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh/2012/01/20/infographic-quantifying-digital-
humanities/
13 3Map of DH activities in India
(Shanmugapriya T and
Nirmala Menon, 2020)
The level of connectedness and cooperation in DH is highly
relational and depends upon the frame of reference of an observer.
14Connection is a prerequisite for forming diverse and
inclusive network of digital humanities communities.
The short-term challenges for equitable connection –
the insufficiency of software for supporting non-
English languages, the dependence on standardized
commercial platforms, and the lack of funding
How can the DH community support for digitization of cultural data – lead to long-
shift the global dynamics of
term consequences, inc. the hegemony of the
knowledge production and
North/West centre in the academic system, the
build an inclusive and
diverse field? homogenization of scholarly methods and outcomes,
and the underrepresentation of cultural heritage data
of ethnic minorities in digital collections. These
disturbing problems on the dangerously global level
should become a focal point for wider discussions
about infrastructural challenges in DH.
154. Infrastructuring Digital Humanities
• The STS concept of infrastructuring that refers to an
ongoing process of creating, implementing, and
using infrastructures, as well as to the collective
practices that manage a series of tensions between
local and global, individual and community.
• Infrastructuring is an analytical concept that shifts
attention from structure to process and has been
applied in a few different research communities,
including design fields. Using this concept, we can
gain insight into how to design, build, and implement
the infrastructure required to support the formation of
inclusive digital humanities.
• Infrastructuring digital humanities is thus the process
of making strong connections between communities
so that they can evenly access digital knowledge
resources, use these resources to work with local
materials, equally participate in the formation of
knowledge, and share it with the global community.
16
Photo by Shane Rounce on UnsplashGlobal digital humanities as interconnected local nodes that can help build
an inclusive network on top of the geopolitical system of infrastructure
• Strengthening open scholarship practices by opening resources (e.g., data, codes,
publications, syllabus, video lectures) on Creative Commons licenses in open repositories
and platforms accessible to communities (e.g., Humanities Commons’ CORE repository).
• Developing open-source software tools (e.g., Voyant).
• Building open-source publishing platforms (e.g., Manifold).
• Facilitating the development of local digital infrastructure interoperable with both a larger
international digital network and the digitization of cultural heritage materials with a focus on
ethical and legal concerns (e.g., King’s Digital Lab’s collaborative project with Hashemite
University to build Jordan’s digital cultural heritage infrastructure).
17• Supporting the sustainability of digital projects and infrastructural efforts to ensure the
maintenance of cultural and linguistic diversity in the long-term development of digital
knowledge infrastructures (e.g., 28% of the resources nominated for Digital Humanities
Awards in 2012 are no longer accessible).
• Supporting the development of digital tools and software for working with materials in
various languages (e.g., Multilingual DH, an international network of scholars facilitating the
use of digital humanities tools and methods in languages other than English).
• Enhancing dialogues between divergent communities (e.g., Global Outlook::Digital
Humanities group).
• Initiating more discussions about various epistemologies and creating a shared set of
vocabularies to improve mutual understanding (e.g., the concepts of openness might be
perceived differently from one country to another).
• Promoting collaborations across borders that can contribute to mutual discovery, diversity
of knowledges, and epistemic justice.
18• I propose to see globality as a constant state
of becoming global rather than as a fixed
and monolithic entity.
• Infrastructural nodes make up the global
network as a set of local links that are in a
permanent state of interconnections and
disconnections.
• It is important to pay attention to different
infrastructural realizations that contribute not
only to being connected to but also to being
disconnected from the larger ecosystem of
knowledge.
• The attempt to create an inclusive global
network of digital humanities communities is
an unfinished project that requires an in-
depth reflections and discussions of current
global infrastructural divisions and
discussions what else we can do to
reconfigure the global landscape of the field.
Photo by Марьян Блан | @marjanblan on Unsplash 19Thank you!
urszula.pawlicka-deger@kcl.ac.uk | https://pawlickadeger.com | https://dhinfra.org
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