Infrastructure Manifest (v. 1.0)—James Smithies—Introduction—“‘Object of Study’: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies”
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.

  • Land infrastructure in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Ōtautahi/Christchurch), the United Kingdom (London, England), and Australia (Canberra) contributed to concept development and writing the chapter/introduction.
  • The initial 2015 workshop that began exploring Critical Infrastructure Studies (CIS) took place at the University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha (UC) in Ōtautahi/Christchurch.
  • The bulk of the work on the chapter was conducted in Crystal Palace, South London, intersecting the borders of the London Boroughs of Bromley, Croydon, and Southwark. This was the site of the relocated Crystal Palace, designed to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 and originally located at Hyde Park. The exhibition included manufacturing from across the British Empire and was itself a major feat of engineering. The Palace burnt down in 1936, although asepcts of its footprint and some statues still exist. The park acted as a venue for my daily walk, of particular significance during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a potent reminder of the British Empire and its ongoing effects.
  • Significant infrastructural support was provided by King’s College London on the Strand campus in central London. Work occured in the Virginia Woolf Building on Kingsway (built in the early 1900s as one of London’s great new boulevards), and in the Chesham building next to Somerset House, on the bank of the Thames, designed by Sir William Chambers with construction starting in 1776. King’s College London was erected to the east between 1829 and 1834, following requirements that it conformed to Chambers’ design.
  • Finalising the manuscript took place at the Australian National University (ANU) on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land in Canberra.
  • UC works in partnership with with mana whenua, the people of the land, Ngāi Tūāhuriri and with Ngāi Tahu more broadly, which is supported by the UC-Ngāi Tūāhuriri Partnership, according to the protocols of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840). See https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/about-uc/our-story/mana-whenua-of-uc.
  • King’s College London is located in the City of Westminster, the city and borough of the United Kingdom’s Houses of Parliament and large portions of the British government.
  • ANU acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the Traditional Owners of the land upon which the University’s Acton campus is located. See https://www.anu.edu.au/students/contacts/tjabal-indigenous-higher-education-centre.
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/):

Materials in Personal Computers and Laptops

Computer hard drives use neodymium and dysprosium, which allow the drives to be smaller and operate more efficiently. Like hybrid vehicles, almost all batteries found in computers require REMs, including lanthanum, which extends the life of the battery. Europium is used for the color red in computer screens, alongside yttrium and terbium. Cerium, meanwhile, is an effective polisher of computer chips.

Materials in Mobile Phones

Most displays found on cell phones, laptops, and the like use rare earth elements for both their color screens (europium, yttrium, and terbium) and their display strength. iPhones alone contain nine different REMs: yttrium, for the color screen; lanthanum, for the screen, glass polishing, and the phone’s circuitry; cerium, for glass polishing; praseodymium, for the screen, polishing, circuitry, and headphones; neodymium is also found in the phone’s circuitry and headphones; europium both colors the screen and is used in the vibration unit; gadolinium is found in the screen, circuitry, and speakers; terbium for the vibration unit, screen, and polishing; and, finally, dysprosium is used in all the listed components besides glass polishing.

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

  • Jet fuel for transportation on conference trips related to research on the topic of infrastructure

    Estimate of 20,000 miles at estimated 90 miles per gallon according to figures for my typical planes in Wikipedia,“Fuel Econom in Aircraft,” equals 222 gallons

    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 7
    • Satisfaction: 4
  • Electricity for digital infrastructures behind the writing and/or editing of approximately 100 pages of text, preparatory notes, etc. for a chapter

    Estimate of 1,500 Joules, calculated from figures of “Digital Media: 30 to 100 kJ/page for production and < 100 J/page for reproduction” in Table 1 of Chapter 8 in this volume, Javier Cha and Ian M. Miller, “Digital Humanities and the Energetics of Big Data”

    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 9
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

  • Various aircraft for research and conference trips, and migration between Aotearoa/New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction: 3
  • London Underground and Overground trains used for my daily commute in London. This network has run on electricity since 1890, although the generation of that electricity is by no means unproblematic. See https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/bus-vs-tube.
    • Use level: 8
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction: 9
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.

  • Roads and airports used for transportation
  • Mixed public/private energy utility infrastructure
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:

  • Personal library of scholarly books in physical form, supplemented by a few scholarly books in e-book form.
    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction for user: 9
  • University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, King’s College London, Australian National University campus libraries serving as the gateway to (institutional subscriber or licensee of) scholarly materials aggregated or distributed by a variety of vendors in database or other forms. Principal scholarly materials accessed in this way include: articles and other materials in article databases, articles and books from a variety of proprietary, university, or consortium online archives.
    • Use level: 7
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction for user: 8
  • Search engines (primarily Duck Duck Go)

    RSS feeds for para-scholarly materials such as blogs and non-scholarly online materials

    • Use level: 7
    • Reliability: 6
    • Satisfaction for user: 6
  • Social media in the form of Mastodon (but no longer Twitter) used to learn or inquire about relevant scholarly materials, accompanied use of the Humanist listserv for the same discovery purpose.
    • Use level: 3
    • Reliability: 5
    • Satisfaction for user: 5
  • Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) for background information on various topics.
    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction for user: 7

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.

  • Analog tools: zero (almost no paper, pens or other analog tools)
  • Computers: personal laptop, plus secondary tablet computer sometimes used on research trips.
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 7
  • Operating system: Mac OS
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction: 5
Principal software tools
  • Bibliography tool: Zotero
    • Use level: 8
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • Notes tool: Scrivener
    • Use level: 7
    • Reliability:10
    • Satisfaction: 7
  • Word processors (from most to least used): Word, Google Doc, MS Word
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 5
  • Text editors: primarily Notebook++
    • Use level: 4
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 7
  • Spreadsheet tools: Excel and Google Sheets in equal measures.
    • Use level: 5
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 6
  • Image and graphics editing/creation tools: PowerPoint.
    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 7
    • Satisfaction: 5
  • Email tool: MS Outlook, Gmail
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 8
  • Collaboration platform/chat tool: Slack for collaboration with co-authors (co-editors)
    • Use level: 7
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 8

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
  • Google Drive (personal account)
    • Use level: 7
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 7
  • Dropbox (personal account)
    • Use level: 9
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 8
  • Microsoft OneDrive (institutional accounts)
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction: 8
Productivity software in cloud
  • Google Drive (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, etc.)
    • Use level: 7
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 7
Collaboration platforms and services
  • Slack (institutional account)
    • Use level: 8
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 8
Social media
  • Mastodon
    • Use level for this project: 1
    • Reliability: 5
    • Satisfaction: 5
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”