| 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Land infrastructure For example, properties ceded, unceded, public, private, etc. Include only principal land infrastructures. |
|
|
Yes | Yes | 10 | 10 | 10 | Colonialism and the effects of British imperialism and white settler nationalism pervaded all of the locations of my research and living spaces, connecting them in important infrastructural as well as personal ways. | |
|
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. |
Principal materials required for routine research work on this chapter (including daily driving, use of laptop computers and mobile phones) include the following notable rare materials (quoted from Jim Silva, “These 4 Popular Consumer Goods Require a Shocking Amount of Metal to Make” Midwest Industrial Supply (blog), 2016. https://blog.midwestind.com/consumer-goods-large-amounts-metal/):
For a more precise list of materials typically used in a single laptop computer, see Circular Computing, “Raw Materials in a Laptop,” Oct. 16, 2019, https://circularcomputing.com/news/raw-materials-in-a-laptop/, which specifies: 50% steel and aluminum, 26% ABS-PC, 12% Metals, and 9% epoxy (and then further specifies a list with gram weights of 19 minerals and metals). For additional explanations and listings of materials in computers, mobile phones, etc., see Andrew Wheeler, “What Raw Materials Are Used to Make Hardware in Computing Devices?,” engineering.com, Sept. 28, 2018, https://www.engineering.com/story/what-raw-materials-are-used-to-make-hardware-in-computing-devices. The post includes an infographic from a mining consultant showing the materials that make up the 129 grams of an iPhone 6, 16GB model. 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. |
Unknown | Not Applicable | Yes | 10 | 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). |
Materials in trains are included because of reliance on transportation to my campus for writing. Materials in airplanes might also be included due to migration between Aotearoa/New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and travel to give talks related to my research on infrastructure studies. The fact that the “control point” of materials is unknown, too difficult, distributed, or layered and nested (e.g., in layers of corporate, state or province, national, and international regulation) to discover is also an ethical concern. |
||
|
Energy infrastructure For example, principal energy sources and infrastructure used in research, production, and communication |
|
Yes | Yes | 7 | 9 | 9 | The main ethical concern is environmental impact. | ||
|
Transportation infrastructure For example, private or public transportation needed for daily or research trips |
|
Self (subject to terms of vendors and services; and subject to regulatory agencies and laws) | Yes | Yes | 8 | 8 | 9 | The main ethical concern is environmental impact from jet travel, and non-renewable sources of electricity generation in the United Kingdom. | |
|
Architectural infrastructure For example, buildings, labs, rooms |
Campus department buildings and offices at the University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, King’s College London, and the Australian National University, including the UC Arts Lab and King’s Digital Lab. | University and department (with more self control of the Transcriptions Center in my role as its Director during the time of working on this chapter) | Yes | Not Applicable | 4 | 9 | 6 | Designed “public” under column D in the sense that the universities are public. | |
|
Civic, community, national, or regional infrastructure For example, provided by cities, communities, governments, etc. |
|
Cities of Christchurch, London, Canberra. | Yes | Not Applicable | 7 | 9 | 10 | ||
|
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, including UC Arts Lab and King’s Digital Lab. | University | Yes | Not Applicable | 7 | 8 | 8 | Designed “public” under column D in the sense that the universities are public. | |
|
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 |
Labor infrastructure consists in collaboration on this chapter with the other editors of the Critical Infrastructure and Digital Humanities book. For the particular research work of writing this chapter, no specific labor support came from staff, librarians, research assistants, or others (unlike in other DH projects I have led). Assistance in organising and hosting workshops at the University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha and King’s College London was provided by staff of UC Arts Lab and King’s Digital Lab respectively. The exception would be the background labor of campus technology staff for maintaining IT and network infrastructure, librarian staff for maintaining library resources and access, and similar underlying labor support that cannot be specifically or visibly linked to this particular chapter. | Not applicable in this instance | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | 8 | 10 | 9 | The figures in columns E–G report on collaboration with the co-authors of the “Introduction” chapter in this volume (i.e., the co-editors of this volume of Debates in DH). | |
|
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:
By my estimation, approximately 50 percent of research materials used in my work on the Introduction chapter was open access, and the other 50 percent was paywalled. I use “shadow libraries,” primarily but not always to access digital versions of physical books I have paid for using institutional research funding (i.e; a form of format shifting). |
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. | Yes | Yes | 5 | 8 | 5 | Issues with open versus closed access (i.e., my privileged access to knowledge, although variable across the three universities I’ve worked in) and ethical complications of using shadow libraries diminishes my enjoyment of secondary research. This is a separate (infrastructural) issue from the content of those sources. | |
|
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 the “Introduction” chapter of this volume is principally as follows, and resembles that for many of my collaborative projects except for the use of Slack as opposed to other collaboration chat platforms (due to the fact that my institution does not have institutiuonal subscriptioh support for Slack and in this research project Slack support was provided via King’s Digital Laboratory at King’s College). There were also no text-analysis tools for the particular reserach on this chapter, though a corpus linguistics tool was used.
Principal software tools
By my estimation, 95 percent of the software tools I used for this project are proprietary. This would be considerably different for more technical projects. |
Local control point is personal, but some tools such as Gmail or Microsoft Office are network or cloud based, with distributed points of control | Not Applicable | Yes | 7 | 9 | 7 | ||
|
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) |
Storage
Productivity software in cloud
Collaboration platforms and services
Social media
|
Control points are ultimately with the platform providers, which (except for the “federated” Mastodon) are centralized and proprietary. Intermediary control points for platforms used on institutional subscriptions are with university institutions. | Not Applicable | Yes | 8 | 10 | 7 | ||
|
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 |
This infrastructure manifest was completed by James Smithies and reports on the Introduction, “‘Object of Study’: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies”