Infrastructure Manifest (v. 1.0)—Kush Patel—Chapter 14—“Resisting BYOI (Bring Your Own Infrastructure) in Digital Humanities Learning Spaces”
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.

  • Rented apartment in a private residential development in Yelahanka, Bengaluru; a development among other private residential complexes surrounded by the villages of Madappanahalli, Krishnanagar, Muddenahalli, and Avalahalli.
  • Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–Bengaluru campus sits in Govindapura in the watershed of lakes Puttanhelli, Yelahanka, and Attur, modeling the reality of agglomarative new campus development projects in the city at large.
Not Applicable Not Applicable Ethical concerns are not secondary considerations when it comes to digital infrastructures. They must be at the heart and at the center, always. Thus, as co-authors of this chapter, we have sought to embed and make transparent ethical concerns within the very descriptions we have written in this manifest. Please read our chapter through this lens and with this belief as well.

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.

The materials that power so many of our digital technologies and electronic devices, from laptops to smart phones, are violently extracted from lands, places, and communities continuously and most structurally harmed by colonialism and capitalism. These lands and places include Congo, and my collaborators and I recognize that the ongoing genocide occurring in Congo is entangled in the materials infrastructure of the very digital technologies that we relied on in the process of writing this chapter together.

Additionally, we ask: Do we account for the contaminants and carcinogens released in the extraction and processing of the minerals that make up these devices and technologies or are they merely externalities? How does one take stock of the conflict minerals that are a part of the infrastructural slag?

Not Applicable Not Applicable

Energy infrastructure

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

Given that the researching and writing of this chapter took place both on and off the internet grid, the energy infrastructure data is as follows:

  • Electricity

    The source of electricity is primarily thermal, which comes from Yelahanka Diesel Generating Station (YDGS).

  • Telephone and internet

    Vodaphone-Idea, a private telecom service provider and my accessed source of pre-paid data plan for internet and phone usage.

Not Applicable Not Applicable

Transportation infrastructure

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

I have used public transit and institutional bus service to commute to the university and back home in the course of writing this piece. Not Applicable Not Applicable

Architectural infrastructure

For example, buildings, labs, rooms

Campus departmental building and DH research lab, as well as an apartment unit in a residential complex.
  • Home office
  • The Just Futures Co-lab, Rooh, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Bengaluru
Not Applicable Not Applicable

Civic, community, national, or regional infrastructure

For example, provided by cities, communities, governments, etc.

  • Roadways, railways, and airports used for transportation
  • Mixed public/private energy utility infrastructure
Yelahanka New Town and Govindapura in Greater Bengaluru Area, Karnataka (India) Not Applicable Not Applicable

Institutional infrastructure

For example, equipment, services, and “overhead” or “indirect cost recovery” items for grants to universities

The institutional infrastructure most pronounced during those hours spent on writing and editing parts of this chapter include

  • campus wifi
  • lab desktop computing devices, and
  • physical storage facilities for books and reference materials.

My institutional laptop, and along with it, my identity and location are tethered to an institutional account, which also monitors the use of this laptop for institutional security purposes. The institution is capable of revoking my access to the infrastructure if it finds me not living up to their expectations.

Not Applicable Not Applicable

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

The labor infrastructure scaffolding this chapter involved a collaborative, consistent, and committed labor of care, especially as I and my co-authors connected from various lands, including sovereign Indigenous lands, using digital infrastructure built on and through Indigenous lands—and equally, as we scheduled our co-writing, asynchronous writing, and co-editing work on a weekly basis whilst also navigating precarious careers.

In researching for this chapter, we did not have any research assistants nor did we as co-authors seek any external copyediting support. However, the tools and software we used in the process of co-writing this piece are powered and built through extraction from land and water, often located in Indigenous territories and the Global South, and the folks who provide integral labor in running these infrastructures are often working under immensely precarious and coercive conditions.

The writing of this chapter during my on-campus research hours, furthermore, was enabled by the otherwise invisible labor of IT and campus technology staff; departmental librarian staff for keeping open library resources both analog and digital; and campus staff for their everyday maintenance of the research lab.

Not Applicable Not Applicable

Research-content infrastructure

For example, physical libraries and archives, online research materials, shadow libraries, etc.

The research-content and bibliographic infrastructure included the following:

  • Personal library

    Comprising physical books as well as e-books, articles, and book chapters

  • Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed repository (on cloud storage)

    Comprising chapter and article PDFs

  • Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) library

    On campus and e-resources made available via intranet as well as internet services, and involving institutional subscriptions to databases, local and international repositories, and journals.

  • Search engines
    • Google
    • Google Scholar
  • Social media resources
    • BlueSky (primary use)
    • Mastodon (occasional use)
Not Applicable Not Applicable

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)

As a co-authored and collaboratively developed chapter,“Resisting BYOI (Bring Your Own Infrastructure) in Digital Humanities Learning Spaces” came into being for me via the following analog and digital tools:

  • Analog tools
    • Plain notebook
    • Plain printing paper (A4)
    • Pens
  • Computer(s)
    • Personal laptop
    • Institutional laptop (used when working on the chapter from my on-campus lab location) with in-built camera
  • Operating system
    • macOS 14 (personal computer)
    • macOS 12 (institutional laptop)
  • Reference management software
    • Zotero
  • Word processors (from most to least used)
    • Google Doc
    • Microsoft Word
  • Spreadsheet tools (from most to least used)
    • Google Sheets
    • Excel Spreadsheet
  • Interactive hypertext tool
    • Google Slides
    • Twine
  • Image editing tool
    • Adobe Photoshop (as part of both personal and institutional subscriptions to Adobe Creative Cloud)
  • Email tools
    • Gmail (personal)
    • Microsoft Outlook (institutional)
  • Collaboration platform and chat tool
    • Discord, which is where the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective has a server.
  • Headphone
    • Wired headphone with a 3.5-mm headphone jack for laptop use.
Not Applicable Not Applicable

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 (moving the entire archive of Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective from an institutional cloud storage in the US to a personal cloud storage in India), accounting for developments in institutional subscription as well as professional movements.
  • Networked platform
    • Humanities/Knowledge Commons CORE Deposit, which is where the Collective has uploaded past works and presentations for wider membership access; the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective HCommons account is private.
  • Collaboration platform and chat tool
    • Discord
    • WhatsApp
  • Social media
    • BlueSky
    • Mastodon
Not Applicable Not Applicable

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.

Not Applicable Not Applicable Not Applicable
Other infrastructure Infrastructure of Care—It would be worth taking into account the infrastructure of care into which the authors are embroidered into. My collaborators and I have talked about care labor in the previous section, but taking into account care infrastructures in which the authors belong could be something to consider. Much like the infrastructures listed above, this item would make threadbare the proximity to and capacity for caring, caregiving, and caretaking that the author network is responsibilized with. How do the infrastructure of care and its corresponding stack of care duties and responsibilites impact—and redefine—the performance metrics of a scholar? Not Applicable Not Applicable

This infrastructure manifest was completed by Kush Patel and reports on Chapter 14, “Resisting BYOI (Bring Your Own Infrastructure) in Digital Humanities Learning Spaces.”