Infrastructures

ESU Leipzig, 2016

Dr Jennifer Edmond

Trinity College Dublin

“facilities, resources or services of a unique nature that have been identified by pan-European research communities to conduct top-level activities in all fields. This definition of Research Infrastructures, including the associated human resources, covers major equipment or sets of instruments, as well as knowledge containing resources such as collections, ‑archives and databases. Research Infrastructures may be “single-sited”, “distributed”, or “virtual” (the service being provided electronically). They often require structured information systems related to data management, enabling information and communication. These include technology-based infrastructures such as grid, computing, software and middleware.”

European Roadmap for Research infrastructures (1st ed., p. 16). (2006). Luxembourg

“Morphologically, digital infrastructures can be defined as shared, unbounded, heterogeneous, open, and evolving sociotechnical systems comprising an installed base of diverse information technology capabilities and their user, operations, and design communities”

Tilson, D., Lyytinen, K., & Sørensen, C. (2010). Research commentary - digital infrastructures: the missing IS research agenda. Information Systems Research, 21(4), 748-759.

Infrastructure gets ‘below the level of the work,’ “i.e. without specifying exactly how work is to be done or exactly how information is to be processed. Most systems that attempt to force conformity to a particular conception of a work process (e.g. Lotus Notes) have failed to achieve infrastructural status because they violate this principle. By contrast, email has become fully infrastructural because it can be used for virtually any work task.”

P. Edwards, S. Jackson, G Bowker and C Knobel, Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions and Design (2007)

“the term cyberinfrastructure is meant to denote the layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry but developed for specific scholarly purposes: cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline. So, for example, digital history collections and the collaborative environments in which to explore and analyze them from multiple disciplinary perspectives might be considered cyberinfrastructure, whereas fiber-optic cables and storage area networks or basic communication protocols would fall below the line for cyberinfrastructure”

John Unsworth, Our Cultural Commonwealth

“Infrastructures meditate. They are the structures ‘in between’that allow things people and signs to travel across space by means of more or less standardised paths and more or less standard protocols for converstion or translation. Thinking of infrastructures as mediating interfaces, that is as points of interaction and translation on material, institutional and discurive levels allows us to get to the heart of the dynamics we seek to capture.”

Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe, edited by A. Badenoch, A. Fickers

“In its widest sense, infrastructure allows us as finite individuals to achieve beyond our individual capacity to know, to do, to see.”

Jennifer Edmond, IJHAC 2013

” Research infrastructures are complex agglomerations of knowledge, data, people, and services that bring together diverse resources for a wide user base and make these resources (re)usable and available for an appropriately long term in order to support research (either individual or collaborative) and share the results of that research.”

PARTHENOS Project

But are they infrastructures…

1. Voyant, http://voyant-tools.org/2. Bamboo DiRT, http://dirtdirectory.org/3. CLARIN, https://www.clarin.eu/4. EHRI, http://www.ehri-project.eu/5. MiTH, http://mith.umd.edu/6. Europeana, http://www.europeana.eu/portal/7. Hathi Trust, https://www.hathitrust.org/ (see also https://www.hathitrust.org/htrc)8. NINES, http://www.nines.org/9. Trinity Library Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/10. Hypothese/Episciences/Hal, https://www.episciences.org/, http://en.hypotheses.org/11. Your own institution

Project?Tool?

Teaching or

Public???

Other?

Project?Tool?

Teaching or

Public???

Scale and Complexity

Diverse usersDiverse resourcesDiverse methodsMultiple research phases (Data to Knowledge: Federate, integrate, assimilate, communicate)

Standards, Data lifecycle, Persistent Identifiers, IPR and LicensingConnected and Connecting‘Evolving and Involving’Open (source, data, culture, api)

Available, Interoperable and Sustainable

Support for research methods and communications

Granularity and type of data, knowledgeBaseline of expertise expected

Infrastructural Practices

Networks and Communities

Knowledge and Publications

Research Data Collections

Software, Tools and Services

Other?

Bricks and Mortar

Infrastructural Assets

Networks and Communities

Knowledge and Publications

Research Data Collections

Software, Tools and Services

Other?

Bricks and Mortar

Research Centre

Technical Infrastructure

Knowledge Infrastructure

ResearchInfrastructure

StandardsOrganisation