This template is in the form of a spreadsheet designed to collect information from authors contributing to Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities about the principal or representative infrastructures behind the work needed to create their chapter (e.g., to research, collaborate on, collect, store, analyze, visualize, write, edit, and share materials). To be clear, the manifest is intended to represent only the infrastructure behind the making of chapters, not of any projects or resources that chapters discuss.
For co-authored chapters, authors should complete individual infrastructure manifests. (It would be ideal if all co-authors could do so. But at a minimum, at least one principal author should do so to represent the other others.) The reason we are asking for individual manifests from co-authors is that after experimentation we found that aggregating several author’s infrastructures in a single manifest produced a hodge-podge of results that is not meaningful (or less meaningful) than seeing a single person’s ecosystem of infrastructure. Aggregate infrastructure manifests would only be meaningful for statistical reporting on hundreds or thousands of authors.
It is at the discretion of authors what, how much, and how to report on their principal or representative infrastructures. Not all fields need to be filled in; or fields can be filled in with “unknown” or “N/A” (“not applicable”). An infrastructure manifest need not (and, in reality, cannot) be comprehensive. It is instead a representation of an author’s judgment about what is important to declare as a way of making the infrastructure of their knowledge work “visible” (to use Susan Leigh Star well-known postulate that infrastructure is usually “invisible”).
| 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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Yes | Yes | 10 | 10 | 10 | The major ethical concern at my university and area of residence is the use of the unceded indigenous lands of the Chumash people. | Reliability equals 10 during the period of time needed to write chapter 1 (Introduction). But over te long term the reliability scores is 9, meaning that natural, human-made, and human-accelerated risks and constraints constrain the use of the land in my area in various ways (due to wiildfire evacuations, drought conditions, and floods). In my time at UCSB, one wildfire evacuation order came near enough to my univeristy and residence to force the cessation of work; and one flooding in the Santa Barbara area forced the stoppage of work at the university and major accademic term disruptions). |
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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. |
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 Silva, Jim. “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 cars are included because of reliance on transportation to my campus for some of my research. By the same token, materials in airplanes might also be included due to travel to give talks related to my research on infrstructutre 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. |
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Energy infrastructure For example, principal energy sources and infrastructure used in research, production, and communication |
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See fact sheet from the California Energy Commission on “California’s Energy Governing Institutions” |
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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Self (subject to terms of vendors and services; and subject to regulatory agencies and laws) | Not Applicable | Yes | 3 | 9 | 9 | The main ethical concern is environmental impact. | |
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Architectural infrastructure For example, buildings, labs, rooms |
Campus department building, offices, and Transcriptions Center for DH & New Media | 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 | 1 | 10 | 7 | Designed “public” under column D in the sense that UC Santa Barbara is a public university. | |
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Civic, community, national, or regional infrastructure For example, provided by cities, communities, governments, etc. |
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State of California; cities of Goleta and Santa Barbara | Yes | Not Applicable | 5 | 9 | 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. | University | Yes | Not Applicable | 5 | 9 | 7 | Designed “public” under column D in the sense that UC Santa Barbara is a public university. The main reason for the relative low level of “satisfaction” is due to the withdrawal of staff from humanities departments after the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and their centralization in multi-department staffing hubs, resulting in decreased contact with and support by staff for scholars, and staff “burnout” and high turnover due to increased stress of supporting multiple departments with low personal contact and satisfaction and the structural problem of career progression only through moves to other departments. | |
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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 |
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). 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 | 10 | 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). | |
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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:
By my estimation, approximately 50% of research materials used in my work on the Introduction chapter was open access, and the other 50% was paywalled. There was to my knowledge no use of “shadow libraries.” |
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 | 3 | 8 | 7 | ||
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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 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 institutional subscription support for Slack and in this research project Slack support was provided via King’s Digital Laboratory at King’s College). For this project I also did not use kanban-style collaboration/task/project manager systems such as Trello (which I typically use for managing projects at the scale of up to 50–60 participants at a time). There were also no text-analysis tools for the particular research on this chapter, though a corpus linguistics tool was used.
Principal software tools
By my estimation, 95% of the software tools I use are proprietary. |
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 | ||
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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) |
Storage
Productivity software in cloud
Collaboration platforms and services
Social media
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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 (e.g, UCSB for the institutional account for Google Drive and King’s College for the Slack subscription). | Not Applicable | Yes | 8 | 10 | 8 | ||
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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 |
Personal residence and office decor
An often overlooked category of knowledge-work infrastructure or any other kind of work-related infrastructure is the personal, social, and aesthetic decor—much more than “decoration”—that makes infrastructure fully livable in comforting, ergonomic, mindful, customized or otherwise “bumpered” ways (in the way that parents of newborns might place rubber or felt bumpers over sharp corners in their homes). An example of such decor in my personal workspace—usually my dining room table at home—is the “Infinite Objects” digital artifact gifted to me by my daughter, who is herself a designer. It is a touch of digital design and art thematically suited to my interests that I see all the time, but usually without “seeing” it (in a way that likens decor and design to what Susan Leigh Star calls the “invisibility” of infrastructure). An “Infinite Object”
One digital artist’s object for sale on the InfiniteObjects.com site: “hello world,” by Kazumasa Teshigahara. This is the one given to me by my designer daughter, which graces my workspace below my work screens. |
Not Applicable | Yes | 10 | 10 | 10 |
This infrastructure manifest was completed by Alan Liu and reports on the Introduction, “‘Object of Study’: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies”