Big Digital Humanities: Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital by Patrik Svensson

Author:Patrik Svensson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Interlude 6: Framing Infrastructure and a Call for Leadership

As the ex-director of HUMlab and someone involved in building material environments, part of my job is to think about our work in infrastructural terms. This strategy is not just pragmatic but comes from a belief that the material level of infrastructure can articulate deep conceptual foundations and that the interplay between the conceptual and material levels can be very productive. Page 135 →Infrastructure may seem solid and not particularly subjective, but it is the result of institutional, cultural, political, and conceptual processes. An excellent example of this embeddedness is Nicole Starosielski’s work on the infrastructure of undersea cables, which investigates how infrastructure for the “immaterial” Internet is very material, situated, and a result of cultural production.7 Such knowledge can and should inform our thinking about infrastructure, particularly since funding schemes and ideas of infrastructure are typically not based on humanistic or cultural challenges but rather on those of science, engineering and technology.

When HUMlab applied for infrastructural funding from the Swedish Research Council in the early 2000s, what we imagined clearly did not fit the template offered by the funding agency. In particular, we envisioned a disparate set of technologies in relation to an idea about how that infrastructure could further humanities research. Such funding is often keyed to the idea of expensive scientific apparatuses, and the call explicitly mentioned “functional units.” For all kinds of reasons, we did not receive funding, but the process helped us to think about the framing of infrastructure. Such framing must clearly draw on humanities-based notions of infrastructure but also must take cues from areas with a stronger infrastructural engagement to strengthen the argument for humanistic infrastructure.

In the spring of 2012, I had talked with scholars and research leaders from the sciences and medicine at Umeå University. At the same time, various schools at the university, including the arts and humanities, had been asked to identify and articulate their infrastructural needs as a result of a decrease in the national funding for infrastructure and a corresponding increase in the need for universities to fund more of their infrastructure.

My discussions with chemists, biologists, and plant science physicists showed that their operations already had a clear infrastructural framing. Again, this may not be surprising, but I was struck by how this was not just a strategic sentiment: individual scholars saw it as key to their work and a reason for being at Umeå University. They often used the word platform, and such a notion can be quite useful (and critiqued, see Interlude 2 in chapter 1). For example, a range of science and medicine disciplines at the university are oriented around a number of key platforms (such as proteomics and metabolomics) that are sets of infrastructures or specific, costly apparatuses and associated methodological competence. These platforms possess a sense of sharing, both in the sense of use and accessibility and in the sense of (external) funding. In practice, however, not all platforms are equally accessible, Page 136 →and problems may arise when some stakeholders do not know enough to use these devices.

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