What is infrastructure?

Technical implementation

Visibility f Scholar	Technical implementation	Examples
End user == tech person	Tools, platforms	Manifold
End-user =/= tech person	Software, programs	OJS
Developers	Libraries
Developer not even publisher	Standards, specifications

Dimensions of infrastructure

It is already interesting to note that a lot of the infrastructure currently discussed would not fit into any of these individual categories. For example, a data repository could be used to discover new content, would be used in the analysis and publication processes, and plays a role in assessment.

The question arises if we can find another definition for infrastructure. According to Star and Ruhleder we shouldn't be too concerned with the question of defining what counts as infrastructure and what does not, but instad ask when are infrastructures in order to capture the situational nature of it. They propose that infrastructure emerge with these 8 dimensions:

Embededdness

Infrastructure is "sunk" into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies;

• What about discipline-specific tools?

Transparency

Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks;

• OJS running in the background of many journals

Reach or scope

This may be either spatial or temporal—infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice;

• Research tools vs research infrastructure.
  • local vs global
  • project time vs infrastructure time

Learned as part of membership

The taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1992; Star, in press). Strangers and outsiders encounter infrastructure as a target object to be learned about. New participants acquire a naturalized familiarity with its objects as they become members;

Links with conventions of practice

Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice, e.g. the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs. Generations of typists have learned the QWERTY keyboard; its limitations are inherited by the computer keyboard and thence by the design of today's computer furniture (Becker 1982);

Embodiment of standards

Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion.

Built on an installed base

Infrastructure does not grow de novo: it wrestles with the "inertia of the installed base" and inherits strengths and limitations from that base. Optical fibers run along old railroad lines; new systems are designed for backward-compatibility; and failing to account for these constraints may be fatal or distorting to new development processes (Monteiro, et al. 1994);

Becomes visible upon breakdown

The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks; the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are back-up mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now-visible infrastructure.

Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally

Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above. Changes take time and negotiation and adjustment with other aspects of the systems involved.

Why does it matter?

Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and collaborators have always had a critical outlook in mind when they started to investigate "infrastructures". The fundamnetal element that emerges is relationality; the idea that infrastructures only emerge and make sense in context with their respective communities of use.

“Analytically, infrastructure appears only as a relational property, not as a thing stripped of use.” (Star and Ruhleder, 1996: 113)

Furthermore, this relationality opens the door to question power dynamics and the consequences of different relations to infrastructure.

One person’s infrastructure is another’s brick wall, or in some cases, one person’s brick wall is another’s object of demolition.

Standards, Disciplines, Categories

Standards (citation styles) Categories (disciplines, publication status, indexing Metadata (crossref)

Master narratives

In terms of infrastructure, this may mean recovering the narrative before being able to analyze it. Again, this implies digging into the construction sites of infrastructures – standards setting, creating of classification systems, decisions to invest in one sort of system or another.

Visible and invisible work

Paper: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work

What counts (or can be seen) as work always depends on the lens that is used to view it.