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Digital Infrastructure for the Humanities in Europe and the US: Governing Scholarship through Coordinated Tool Development

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In this paper, I provide a comparative perspective on current digital infrastructure policies for the humanities in Europe and the US. Thereby I mean to move beyond analyzing the shaping of technology within individual infrastructure projects and instead trace in a more encompassing way how dynamics at the institutional and policy level mediate the reorganization of disciplinary tool development. Drawing conceptual inspiration from the work of Sheila Jasanoff, I propose that digital infrastructure actually functions as a regulatory technology, i.e. as an interface through which the different actor groups (researchers, funders, policy makers) rearticulate their mutual relations. European initiatives, I argue, are based on a more centralizing, technology-driven vision of digital infrastructure that serves the European Commission’s policy goal of integrating national research systems in institutional and epistemic terms. This causes a certain disconnect between tool developers and prospective scholarly users who are often unfamiliar with digital approaches, but the emphasis on central coordination also ensures that no single community gains exclusive control over technology development. In the US, by contrast, the original impetus to adopt a concerted strategy for digital infrastructure has not been provided by science policy makers and administrators, but by researchers in the area of digital humanities. These scholars have successfully promoted a sociotechnical view of infrastructure as an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon, which also implies that conceptual and managerial authority should be situated at well-established digital humanities centers. While avoiding problems related to the implementation of technology in more traditional scholarly practices, this arrangement will tend to privilege the intellectual and technological preferences of existing elites within digital humanities over those of other research communities.

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Kaltenbrunner, Wolfgang (2017): Digital Infrastructure for the Humanities in Europe and the US: Governing Scholarship through Coordinated Tool Development. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 26, No. 3. DOI: 10.1007/s10606-017-9272-2. Springer. PISSN: 1573-7551. pp. 275-308

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cyberinfrastructure, digital humanities, digital infrastructure, European research area, humanities, infrastructure policy, regulatory technology

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Number of citations to item: 9

  • Helena Karasti, Jeanette Blomberg (2017): Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2(27), doi:10.1007/s10606-017-9296-7
  • Drew Paine, Charlotte P. Lee (2020): Coordinative Entities: Forms of Organizing in Data Intensive Science, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 3(29), doi:10.1007/s10606-020-09372-2
  • Temitayo Abiodun, Giselle Rampersad, Russell Brinkworth (2022): Driving Industrial Digital Transformation, In: Journal of Computer Information Systems 6(63), doi:10.1080/08874417.2022.2151526
  • Rui Liu, Dana McKay, George Buchanan (2021): Humanities Scholars and Digital Humanities Projects: Practice Barriers in Tools Usage, In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-86324-1_25
  • Gaia Mosconi, Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho, Hussain Abid Syed, Dave Randall, Helena Karasti, Volkmar Pipek (2023): Fostering Research Data Management in Collaborative Research Contexts: Lessons learnt from an ‘Embedded’ Evaluation of ‘Data Story’, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 4(32), doi:10.1007/s10606-023-09467-6
  • Elena Parmiggiani, Nana Kwame Amagyei, Steinar Kornelius Selebø Kollerud (2023): Data curation as anticipatory generification in data infrastructure, In: European Journal of Information Systems 5(33), doi:10.1080/0960085x.2023.2232333
  • 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
  • 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
  • Gaia Mosconi, Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho, Hussain Abid Syed, Dave Randall, Helena Karasti, Volkmar Pipek (2022): Fostering Research Data Management in Collaborative Research Contexts: Lessons learnt from an ‘Embedded’ Evaluation on designing a ‘Data Story’, doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2255943/v1
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