parthenos training: infrastructures - the infrastructural turn

PARTHENOS-project.eu

The infrastructural Turn in Humanities Research

ESU Leipzig, 2016

Dr Jennifer Edmond

Trinity College Dublin


Research Infrastructure, Knowledge Infrastructure

To begin with the historical dimension, it is worth noting that it was in the field of Humanities that the idea of an RI was first born. It is not possible here to write a cultural history of RIs but it is most insightful to note that as early as the 3rd century B.C., the imperative to collect, organise and conserve the knowledge acquired in the service of the advancement of knowledge gave birth to the first ever ‘Information Centre’ in the form of the Mouseion, a cultural centre, university and library founded in Alexandria under the successors of Alexander the Great. The positive consequences of this ambitious venture soon became obvious, as the production of various RIs in the form of Grammars and Lexica proliferated.


Part 2: The ‘Long Now’ of Research Infrastructure

Indeed, it has been suggested that the ‘long now’ of cyberinfrastructure:…is about 200 years. This is when two suites of changes began to occur in the organization of knowledge and the academy which have accompanied – slowly – the rise of an information infrastructure to support them: an exponential increase in information gathering activities by the state (statistics) and knowledge workers (the encyclopedists) on the one hand and the accompanying development of technologies and organizational practices to sort, sift and store information. P. Edwards, S. Jackson, G Bowker and C Knobel, Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics,

Tensions and Design, http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353, last accessed 16 November 2012, 3.


2006: A Turning Point

Publication of the ESFRI Roadmap: ‘to describe the scientific needs for Research Infrastructures for the next 10-20 years, on the basis of a methodology recognised by all stakeholders, and take into account input from relevant inter-governmental research organisations as well as the industrial community.’

European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, European Roadmap for Research Infrastructures, Report 2006, 5


2006: A Turning Point II

Publication of ‘Our Cultural Commonwealth’ http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/ourculturalcommonwealth.pdf


Research Infrastructures as ‘below the level of the work’

[operating] without specifying exactly how work is to be done or exactly how information is to be processed (Forster and King, 1995). 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 (Grudin, 1989; Vandenbosch and Ginzberg, 1996). By contrast, email has become fully infrastructural because it can be used for virtually any work task.

Edwards, Jackson, Bowker and Knobel, Understanding Infrastructure, 17.


Challenges to the (Digital) Library

Capacity to maintain what is produced by scholars (from shelves to racks)

Capacity to enable new methodologies (beyond reading to‘distant reading,’ from history to ‘transnational history’)

Capacity to be open (or indeed ‘inside out’), and to facilitate ‘data soup’

Capacity to maintain high‘up-front’ investment mentality

Moretti, Franco. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1, Jan/Feb 2000.


Challenges to the (Digital) Library


Thank youwww.parthenos-project.eu

Jennifer EdmondTrinity College Dublin

[email protected] www.tcd.ie

http://www.parthenos-project.eu/

parthenos training: infrastructures - the infrastructural turn

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