| Infrastructure Type | Descriptiona |
Control point for access to or useb For example, identify the owner, regulator, manager, etc. as appropriate |
Open Source, Open Access, or Public Resource/Utilityc | Proprietaryc | How heavily used?d | Reliabilityd | Satisfaction for Userd | Ethical concerns (known or possible) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Land infrastructure For example, properties ceded, unceded, public, private, etc. Include only principal land infrastructures. |
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Not Applicable | Yes | 10 | 10 | 9 | In addition to the occupation of native land and the attendant histories of exclusion, erasure, and systemic discrimination enrolled in the occupation, Fordham University (while governed independently of the church since 1969) shares, to some extent, both the promises and problems of the church. | |
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Materials infrastructure For example, notable common or rare extracted or other materials used in research, production, and communication. Break down by notable materials used in devices or tools if appropriate. |
Personal computer, tablet, and mobile phone materials: Both the writing of this chapter, and the development of the Manifest platform, require hardware. This includes Macbooks, iPhones, and iPads “designed by Apple” but “assembled in China.” There are numerous documents recounting the materiality at stake here. In one that I authored, I noted that “These are networked objects, not only literally within the telecommunication network, but”: “like all global productions, as [entities] inescapably enmeshed in the material network of [their] assembly. [They are] housed in plastics molded in Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, and Russia . . . comprised of metals (aluminum and titanium) and glass (Gorilla and otherwise) bought from Africa, South America, and Asia. The batteries are made from cadmium, nickel, and lithium fashioned sometimes in the United States, but often in Chile or Japan. Each requires components—speakers, microphones, clocks, and sensors—imported from East and Southeast Asia. The circuit board and memory arrive occasionally from Japan and Malaysia, but more often from China and Taiwan. Littered throughout these components are metals—gold, copper, tantalum, tin, and aluminum—drawn from South America (in places like Chile or Brazil) and Africa (from South Africa and the Congo). These myriad and precious ingredients are identified, gathered, processed, and assembled in factories in some of the poorest regions on the earth . . . [These are] heterogeneous productions made with heterogeneous engineering . . . Plastics are fused by (and with) people. Metals are produced by first producing miners, then producing mines. To an already troublesome litany, a comprehensive account must add actors, sites, and politics—both lives and ways of life.” Hockenberry, Matthew. “Material Epistemologies of the (Mobile) Telephone.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 91 no. 2, 2018, p. 485–524. Excluded in this tabulation of materials infrastructure are materials in transportation, architectural, and other infrastructure beyond personal control; and in networking and cloud server farm infrastructures. |
Various. Primarily personal control of computer and mobile phone. The server materials are controlled by Akamai (and previously, Abelohost). | Not Applicable | Yes | 10 | 9 | 9 | The main ethical concerns are environmental (contributing to unsustainable impacts on the environment through materials extraction and energy usage) and social (unknown labor conditions along the chain of materials extraction, manufacture, and transport). | |
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Energy infrastructure For example, principal energy sources and infrastructure used in research, production, and communication |
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New York State, New York City, and the State of New Jersey, along with a variety of public/private utility companies (Con Edison, PSEG, etc.). | Yes | Yes | 7 | 9 | 9 | The main ethical concern is environmental impact. | |
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Transportation infrastructure For example, private or public transportation needed for daily or research trips |
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NJ Transit and MTA, the governmental organizations/corporate entities responsible for public transportation. | Yes | Yes | 4 | 9 | 7 | The main ethical concern is environmental impact. | |
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Architectural infrastructure For example, buildings, labs, rooms |
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University and department. | Not Applicable | Yes | 2 | 10 | 7 | ||
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Civic, community, national, or regional infrastructure For example, provided by cities, communities, governments, etc. |
Railways used for transportation; mixed public/private energy utility infrastructure. | New York State, New York City, and the State of New Jersey | Yes | Yes | 5 | 7 | 7 | ||
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Institutional infrastructure For example, equipment, services, and “overhead” or “indirect cost recovery” items for grants to universities |
Campus network and overhead and staffing costs for research work, various other indirect cost items budgeted as part of Manifest’s Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. | University and department. | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | 5 | 9 | 7 | ||
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Labor infrastructure For example, type and amount of labor from collaborators, staff, research assistants; include any attributes that seem important, such as unrecognized, unpaid, low-paid, outsourced, or other attributes of labor |
Manifest’s development is supported by a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to Fordham and University of Colorado Boulder which supports both myself and my Co-PI on the grant. This has supported hiring several undergraduate and graduate students (at Fordham, University of Colorado Boulder, and—in one case—a graduate student enrolled at the University of Delaware but based in New York). | Personal, with grant budget under ultimate authority of Fordham University and University of Colorado Boulder. | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | 8 | 10 | 10 | The main ethical concern is regarding labor rights—working conditions and appropriate compensation. While I believe we have provided reasonable working conditions and above-average compensation, I represent “management” from the perspective of the project. | |
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Research-content infrastructure For example, physical libraries and archives, online research materials, shadow libraries, etc. |
Principal research infrastructures providing content (research materials in the form of books, articles, images, etc.) include:
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Principal control points are vendors (publishers, research aggregators and databases, etc.) whose subscriptions or licenses are mediated through the downstream control point of my university’s library. | Not Applicable | Yes | 3 | 8 | 8 | The main ethical concern is the lack of open access materials used in the research process. | |
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Tools infrastructure For example, principal analog tools and digital tools, scripts, or protocols used for research, writing, communication, production (excluding high-performance computing, for which see below) |
The tools ecosystem for working on my chapter and for the development of the Manifest platform featured in that chapter is as follows: Core hardware/software
Principal software tools
These tools are largely proprietary.
Manifest platform development tools
These tools are primarily open source.
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Local control point is personal, but some tools such as Gmail are network or cloud based, with distributed points of control. | Yes | Yes | 7 | 9 | 9 | ||
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Networked Platforms infrastructure For example, major networked or cloud platforms used for research, storage, analysis, sharing, communication, publication—Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS, etc. (excluding high-performance computing, for which see below) |
Cloud storage and productivity software
Collaboration platforms and services
Manifest platform server environment
Which overlaps with personal development tools; this environment is primarily run by open source sotware:
Social media
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Some control points are with the platform providers, and (except for the “federated” Mastodon) are centralized and proprietary (and largely available by university licensing agreement). A number of other tools (Discourse, etc.)—which are the ones most significant to the project) are hosted on the supplystudies.com server and largely under our control outside of the requirements by the hosting provider (Akamai). | Yes | Not Applicable | 8 | 9 | 8 | The main ethical concerns are environmental impact owing to the uncertain geographies required by cloud infrastructure, its energy use, and the entanglements of its complex depencies. | |
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High-performance computing infrastructure Here defined expansively to include the use not just of supercomputers and computer clusters or grids but any high-performance computing infrastructure or special GPU and other processors exceeding the capabilities of an individual workstation, laptop, or server. |
None | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | ||||||
| Other infrastructure | Not Applicable | Not Applicable |
This infrastructure manifest was completed by Matthew Hockenberry and reports on Chapter 4, “Manifesting Connection: Digital Humanities for the Critical Study of Logistics.”