This Is Not a Fish: On the Scale and Politics of Infrastructure Design Studies
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Interconnected workplace information technologies (information infrastructures) are distributed across user and system types, agendas, locales, and temporal rhythms. The term infrastructuring describes the design of information infrastructure not as a bounded phase but as a continuous collaborative and inherently political process. From the perspective of ethnographers, however, this conceptualization presents the practical challenge of dealing with the political work involved in infrastructuring and in its study. In this paper, I discuss the challenges of infrastructuring activities for ethnographic research. Based on a self-revealing account of my three-year ethnographic study of an oil company’s project to design a platform for subsea environmental monitoring in the Arctic region, I discuss how my framing of infrastructuring was the result of my process of constructing the ethnographic field in my research. I combined four mechanisms to scale my ethnographic method to investigate infrastructuring across heterogeneous dimensions. Drawing on my practical experience, I discuss how my process of constructing the field let me discover richer possibilities for understanding the politics involved in the study of infrastructuring.
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Number of citations to item: 14
- Helena Karasti, Jeanette Blomberg (2017): Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2(27), doi:10.1007/s10606-017-9296-7
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- Volkmar Pipek, Helena Karasti, Geoffrey C. Bowker (2017): A Preface to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 1-2(26), doi:10.1007/s10606-017-9271-3
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- Will Sutherland, Drew Paine, Charlotte P. Lee (2024): ‘The Cloud is Not Not IT’: Ecological Change in Research Computing in the Cloud, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 4(33), doi:10.1007/s10606-024-09490-1
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- Peter Lyle, Mariacristina Sciannamblo, Maurizio Teli (2018): Fostering Commonfare. Infrastructuring Autonomous Social Collaboration, In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi:10.1145/3173574.3174026
- Helena Karasti, Volkmar Pipek, Geoffrey C. Bowker (2018): An Afterword to ‘Infrastructuring and Collaborative Design’, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2(27), doi:10.1007/s10606-017-9305-x
- R. Stuart Geiger, Dorothy Howard, Lilly Irani (2021): The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW1(5), doi:10.1145/3449249
- Elena Parmiggiani, Helena Karasti (2018): Surfacing the arctic, In: Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated Actions, Workshops and Tutorial - Volume 2, doi:10.1145/3210604.3210625
- Filip Bircanin, Margot Brereton, Laurianne Sitbon, Bernd Ploderer, Andrew Azaabanye Bayor, Stewart Koplick (2021): Including Adults with Severe Intellectual Disabilities in Co-Design through Active Support, In: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445057
- Luis E. Sepúlveda-Rodríguez, José Luis Garrido, Julio C. Chavarro-Porras, John A. Sanabria-Ordoñez, Christian A. Candela-Uribe, Carlos Rodríguez-Domínguez, Gabriel Guerrero-Contreras (2021): Study-based Systematic Mapping Analysis of Cloud Technologies for Leveraging IT Resource and Service Management: The Case Study of the Science Gateway Approach, In: Journal of Grid Computing 4(19), doi:10.1007/s10723-021-09587-7
- Niall Hayes, Lucas D. Introna, Noel Cass (2021): Participatory Design as the Temporal Flow of Coalescing Participatory Lines, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 4(30), doi:10.1007/s10606-021-09405-4
- Jeremy Huggett (2024): Deconstructing the Digital Infrastructures Supporting Archaeological Knowledge, In: Current Swedish Archaeology, doi:10.37718/csa.2023.01