General Instructions for filling out this manifest

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 Manifest (v. 1.0)—Alan Liu—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 for the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), owned by the Regents of the University of California on the villages and unceded lands of the Chumash people.

    While UCSB is a land-grant public university, its land was not actually granted through the nineteenth-century Morrill Acts, which in California granted indigenous lands only to one of the UC campuses (Berkeley). See Hannah Z Morley, “Universities and Colleges: Land-Grant meant Land-Grab,” Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, 2021, https://www.hfa.ucsb.edu/news-entries/2021/1/27/the-truth-behind-land-grab-universities.

  • Private home and residence on unceded Chumash land near UCSB and the Goleta Slough.

    On the prehistory of the Goleta Slough, see Tom Modugno, “The Goleta Slough.” Goleta History (blog), 2021, https://goletahistory.com/the-goleta-slough/; and Terry L. Jones, “Goleta Slough Prehistory: Insights Gained from a Vanishing Archaeological Record.” California Archaeology 13, no. 1 (2021): 119–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/1947461X.2021.1933002.

  • Commercial property for shopping mall near my home leased for one coffee shop by Starbucks, where I work during two or more days each week.
  • University property

    UC Santa Barbara and Regents of the University of California system, with regulatory control for use of land by such agencies as the California Coastal Commission.

  • Personal real estate

    Personal control, overlapping with control of external parts of property by Homeowner’s Associalion (HOA) for the housing developent.

  • Coffee shop property

    Controlled by Starbucks corporate chain as lessee of shopping mall property owned by a real estate investment, development and property management company based in Santa Barbara.

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).

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/):

Materials in Hybrid and EV Cars

Of the 17 rare earth metals found in the Earth’s crust, hybrid cars require as many as eight, primarily powering the green batteries found in the vehicles through magnetism, according to Mother Jones. Dysprosium allows magnets to operate at high temperatures, an absolutely essential feature for the hybrid system. The drive units and motors of hybrids use neodymium, dysprosium, and praseodymium, which scientists are now extracting from discarded electric and hybrid cars (dysprosium and neodymium are two of five rare earths the Department of Energy list as “critical and essential for clean energy technologies”), according to Sciene Daily. In fact, several pounds of rare earth compounds are found in hybrid batteries; therefore, recycling the metals will help limit the US’s dependence on REM imports from China, as Geology.com explains. Lanthanum is also used in the hybrid engines, and cerium is effective at reducing automotive emissions, as NCPA.

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 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.

Energy infrastructure

For example, principal energy sources and infrastructure used in research, production, and communication

  • Gasoline for automobile transportation in a hybrid car to campus for research visits to library and other facilities: 2.85 gallons

    Estimate of 120 miles total using gas at 42 miles per gallon equals 2.85 gallons.

    • Use level: 3
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • Jet fuel for transportation on conference trips related to research on the topic of infrastructure: estimate of 20,000 miles

    Estimated 90 miles per gallon according to figures for my typical planes in Wikipedia, “Fuel Economy in Aircraft”, equals 222 gallons.

    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 7
    • Satisfaction: 4
  • Electricity in California (and from out-of-state sources) for hybrid and EV cars: unknown

    Could in principle be calculated according to the proportional figures for the coal, natural gas, oil, “other,” nuclear, large hydro, biomas, geothermal, small hydro, solar, and wind sources of California electricity tabulated for recent years in the California Energy Commision’s website for “California Energy Data.” An example breakdown by source on that website’s page for “2022 Total System Electric Generation.”

    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • Electricity for digital infrastructures behind the writing 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
  • State of California
  • California Energy Commission
  • California Public Utilities Commission
  • California Independent System Operator

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.

Transportation infrastructure

For example, private or public transportation needed for daily or research trips

  • Hybrid car for commute to my campus (Toyota Prius)
    • Use level: 3
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • EV car for commute to my campus (Nissan Leaf)
    • Use level: 3
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 10
  • Various aircraft for research and conference trips
    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 7
    • Satisfaction: 4
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.

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.

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
State of California; cities of Goleta and Santa Barbara Yes Not Applicable 5 9 7

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.

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).

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: 6

    A low score due to eyesight issues that make reading physical books now more difficult.

  • UC Santa Barbara campus library 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: Oxford English Dictionary, articles and other materials in JSTOR, articles and books from a variety of proprietary, university, or consortium online archives.
    • Use level: 9
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction for user: 7
  • Search engines (primarily Google) or portals used as finding aids for scholarly materials (especially Google Scholar, but not Academia.edu or ResearchGate); search engines also used as finding aids 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 and Bluesky (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: 7
  • Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) for background information on various topics.
    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction for user: 7

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

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.

  • 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: Windows 11
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 8
    • Satisfaction: 7
Principal software tools
  • Bibliography tool: Zotero
    • Use level: 8
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • Notes tool: Obsidian
    • Use level: 4
    • Reliability:10
    • Satisfaction: 7
  • Word processors (from most to least used): Word, Google Doc, WordPerfect (the latter used to access legacy files and also to supplement more modern tools with macros and scripts I created decades ago)
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 7
  • 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: Paint.NET, PowerPoint (with occasional use of online photo editing platforms such as LunaPic and Pixlr)
    • Use level: 2
    • Reliability: 6
    • Satisfaction: 4
  • Screen capture tool: SnagIT (by TechSmith)
    • Use level: 7
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 7
  • Email tool: 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
  • Corpus Linguistics tool (used for this particular chapter): Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
    • Use level: 1
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 7

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

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 and institutional accounts)
    • Use level: 8
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • Dropbox (personal accouint)
    • Use level: 9
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • Microsoft OneDrive (personal account)
    • Use level: 10
    • Reliability: 9
    • Satisfaction: 8
Productivity software in cloud
  • Google Drive (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, etc.)
    • Use level: 8
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 9
  • Obsidian Notes
    • Use level: 1
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 7
Collaboration platforms and services
  • Slack (institutional account)
    • Use level: 8
    • Reliability: 10
    • Satisfaction: 8
Social media
  • Bluesky and Mastodon
    • Use level for this project: 2
    • 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 (e.g, UCSB for the institutional account for Google Drive and King’s College for the Slack subscription). Not Applicable Yes 8 10 8

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”