Infrastructuring digital humanities: On relational infrastructure and global reconfiguration of the field
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Infrastructuring digital humanities:
On relational infrastructure and
global reconfiguration of the field
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqab086/6372159 by guest on 02 November 2021
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Urszula Pawlicka-Deger
King’s College London, King’s Digital Lab, London, UK
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Abstract
How do the power dynamics of actors in digital knowledge production define the
contours of global science and humanities? Where are scholars now in their efforts
to improve a networked, global academic system based on the values of equal access
to resources, inclusive participation, and the diversity of epistemologies? This art-
icle intervenes in these questions by discussing social dimensions of global know-
ledge infrastructure—connection, standardization, and access—to understand the
specification and materialization of global digital humanities (DH). As digital
practices expand across the world, the DH community struggles to ensure inclusive
participation and equal opportunities in developing the field. This article shows
that discrepancies in global DH lie at the root of existing infrastructure inequalities.
Drawing on science and technology studies, it then argues that in order to overcome
these imbalances, the academic community can seek the ‘infrastructuring’ of DH.
Correspondence: Infrastructuring is an analytical concept that shifts attention from ‘structure’ to
Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, ‘process’ of co-creation in the vein of participatory design that foregrounds public
King’s College London, King’s
engagement, shared interest, and long-term relationships with stakeholders to cre-
Digital Lab, London, UK.
E-mail:
ate networks from which equal opportunities and new forms of connections can
pawlickadeger@gmail.com; emerge. This would involve building an inclusive network of unique nodes of local
Twitter: @UrszulaDeger communities on top of the global knowledge infrastructure.
.................................................................................................................................................................................
1 Introduction Bubola, 2020; Ogbunu, 2020). The pandemic outbreak
has revealed long-standing and deep structural inequi-
The COVID-19 outbreak has been an exceptional time ties that run along demographic, geopolitical, and in-
that has forced society to shift everyday life to online frastructural fault lines (Braveman, 2020). Stay-at-
spaces and create provisional forms of doing and act- home orders have become a matter of privilege.
ing. The pandemic crisis has reminded us that we are all People who have enough resources, including water,
connected and that different time zones could be the electricity supply, and internet connectivity, have
only barriers between us. On the other hand, the cor- been able to continue their lives relatively unchanged
onavirus pandemic has revealed that the current in the lockdown. However, in a world in which 46% of
impediments to global connectivity are much more the population remains without technology or Internet
complex than coordinating events across multiple access (ITU, 2019), social distancing has become syn-
time zones. The Flatten the Curve movement, formed onymous with the digital divide. The pandemic has
to slow the spread of the virus, has become a question prompted a narrative of a compressed and connected
of social justice, privilege, and inequality (Fisher and world in one Zoom-room meeting. But it also
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities V C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. 1 of 17
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://
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doi:10.1093/llc/fqab086U. Pawlicka-Deger
symbolizes global inequality in digital society, where a in developing the field. The infrastructural compo-
human right to access information and knowledge nents are discussed specifically in relation to DH
depends on a parallel right to technology access. that relies strongly on technological capacity and ac-
Where are we now in our efforts to improve a net- cess to data and digital resources. The questions of
worked, global academic system based on the values diversity and inclusivity in the global community,
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of equal access to resources, inclusive participation, however, go far beyond DH and concern any discip-
and the diversity of epistemologies? line that ought to seek equal conditions for participa-
The COVID-19 lockdown has relied on knowledge tion in their advancement. The field of DH might be
infrastructures, putting them to the test and inadvert- therefore seen as the driving force behind contesting
ently exposing all their pre-existing inefficiencies. The and intervening infrastructures and reconfigure their
lockdown has also depended heavily on resilient com- components and values to encompass a humanities
munities that have responded rapidly to support the disposition for diversity and co-existence. As
overnight shift to remote work by creating online Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein stated,
resources and providing advice about coping with ‘Digital humanists can contribute significantly to a
new working conditions (e.g. the FemTechNet net- larger technically and historically informed resistance’
work shared resources on feminist pedagogy in a (Gold and Klein, 2019).
time of coronavirus pandemic [2020] and the I will explore the social side of those three features
Digital Humanities Now publication platform pub- without delving into technical issues, which could
lished ‘COVID-19 Roundup’, a collection of reflec- constitute a topic for another essay (see an in-depth
tions and resources related to digital humanities systems analysis of global humanities cyberinfrastruc-
(DH) and digital pedagogy [2020]). The pandemic ture by Smithies, 2017, pp. 113–151). I aim to show
crisis has foregrounded the concepts of ‘globality’, ‘lo- that discrepancies in global DH lie at the root of exist-
cality’, ‘digitality’, and ‘community’ and revised their ing infrastructure inequalities. These imbalances go
configurations. The times of pandemic have given an beyond the scholars’ abilities to fix them, but I argue
opportunity to rethink the meaning and realizations that the academic community can seek the ‘infrastruc-
of these concepts in relation to our own field of activ- turing’ of DH. This would involve building an inclu-
ity and reconsider some of the pressing questions: sive network of unique nodes of local DH
How do the geopolitics of knowledge determine the communities on top of the existing global knowledge
epistemology of the notions of connection, access, and infrastructure, with a view to influencing the develop-
openness? How do the power dynamics of actors in ment of the field in positive directions.
digital knowledge production (including information Drawing on the field of science and technology
infrastructures, digital libraries, and publishers) define studies (STS), I propose to use the concept of infra-
and materialize the contours of global science and structure as an analytical tool. Infrastructure can be
humanities? seen as a way of producing, organizing, and integrat-
This essay reflects on global dimensions of know- ing heterogeneous resources and knowledge. By trac-
ledge infrastructure to understand the specification ing the DH infrastructures, I aim to observe the
and realization of ‘global digital humanities’—the tensions between the local and global dimensions
branch of DH focused on the global development of and the long-lasting ‘centre and periphery’ division
the field, global representation in the DH community, in the academic system. This will show that issues of
and the situatedness of DH practices at both local and cross-cultural connectivity and inclusivity are the very
global levels. It engages with the ‘complex issues of challenges of providing adequate infrastructures.
how we might define digital humanities in the increas- Infrastructure, as Hannah Knox stated, has the cap-
ingly broad space and places in which the scholarship acity to ‘act as technologies of mediation, as sites for
is created’ (Earhart, 2018a). I propose to look at three differentiation and as vanishing points’ (Knox, 2017,
aspects of infrastructure—connection, standardiza- p. 359). Analysing infrastructure can allow us to reveal
tion, and access—to understand the configuration of these points of connection, demarcation, and disrup-
DH that, as it expands across the world, struggles to tion. I propose to see ‘globality’ as a constant state of
ensure inclusive participation and equal opportunities ‘becoming global’ rather than as a fixed and
2 of 17 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021Infrastructuring digital humanities
monolithic entity. Infrastructure nodes make up the Pawlicka-Deger, 2019). They have also employed
global network as a set of local links that are in a per- quantitative analysis and network analysis to represent
manent state of forming interconnections and discon- the imbalances in the DH community in numbers
nections. It is imperative to pay attention to different (Grandjean, 2016; Weingart and Eichmann-Kalwara,
infrastructural realizations that contribute not only to 2017; Gao et al., 2018). These visualizations and sta-
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being connected to but also to being disconnected tistics are powerful tools that help to expose tenden-
from the larger ecosystem of knowledge. The attempt cies towards linguistic and regional inequalities and
to create a ‘global’ and inclusive network of DH com- disproportions that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
munities is thus an unfinished and ambitious project In this climate, scholars have put great effort into
that requires an in-depth analysis of current global redrawing the global map of DH and easing long-
infrastructural divisions. This essay does not attempt standing tensions by creating new analytical
to provide an extensive analysis but rather serves as a approaches that conceptualize the DH within a global
benchmark for wider discussions of the global infra- context. Theorists have developed notions such as
structural perspective on DH. ‘intersectionality’ (Risam, 2015), ‘accent’ (Risam,
2017), ‘borderlands’ (Earhart, 2018a), and ‘situated-
ness of practices’ (Oiva and Pawlicka-Deger, 2020),
2 Global DH and the Call for drawing on the fields of intersectional feminism, post-
colonial studies, and the geography of knowledge.
Infrastructural Intervention These frameworks seek to construct global DH as a
heterogeneous body of diverse and distributed practi-
With the rise of DH practices around the world, a new
ces. The globality of digital humanities is thus recog-
area of critical interventions emerged with a focus on
nized as a large system comprising unique locally
the global representation of DH and the global aca-
situated settings, methods, and knowledge. Through
demic system of knowledge production. The move
critical engagement and grassroots initiatives, scholars
towards interrogating the global dimension of the have been making changes in the DH community by
DH is a manifestation of resistance to the Western pushing the location of the Alliance of DH
idea of ‘globality’, which is equivalent to the hegem- Organizations (ADHO) conferences outside the
ony of the centre. In recent years, the discussion about USA, Canada, and Europe (e.g. the 2015 DH confer-
the global DH has rapidly expanded to address cum- ence was held in Sydney, Australia) and foregrounding
bersome questions about the dominance of the discussion about the diversity of the community at a
Northern Hemisphere in the academic world, ques- global level (e.g. the theme of the 2015 DH conference
tions about the global dynamics of scholarly know- in Sydney was ‘Global Digital Humanities’, and the
ledge running along the fault lines of ‘centre and the theme of the 2018 DH conference in Mexico City
periphery’ division (Fiormonte, 2014; O’Donnell was ‘Bridges/Puentes’). As Amy E. Earhart rightly
et al., 2016; Risam, 2017; Earhart, 2018a; Ortega, argued, ‘Resisting the homogenization of scholarly
2019), issues about the underrepresentation of minor- methods, questions, outcomes, production and own-
ity groups in mainstream DH and academic discourse ership is the only way to develop a truly robust global
(Earhart, 2012; McPherson, 2012; Risam, 2015; digital humanities’ (Earhart, 2018a).
Bordalejo, 2018; Wernimont and Losh, 2018; Noble, The challenges for achieving diverse, open, and in-
2019), and questions about the lack of geographic and clusive DH lie in the social dimensions noted by
cultural diversity in the DH community (Galina Kathleen Fitzpatrick, which include participation in
Russell, 2014; Fiormonte, 2016; Aiyegbusi, 2018; collaborative and collective projects and incite institu-
Mahony, 2018). tional changes (Fitzpatrick, 2010). At the same time,
Scholars have used the method of mapping as a these difficulties concern technical aspects pointed out
rhetorical tool for revealing the North–South imbal- by Alan Liu, such as the fact that technology, plat-
ance in knowledge creation and distribution forms, and methods can contribute to the under-
(centerNet, 2007; Terras, 2012; Atlas of Digital standing of diversity (Liu, 2018b). The juxtaposed
Humanities and Social Science, 2014; Gil, 2014; social components (attitudes, standards, and policies)
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021 3 of 17U. Pawlicka-Deger
and technical components (tools, software, and arte- social-cum-technological milieu that at once enables
facts) are not separable but are instead interrelated the fulfilment of human experience and enforces con-
entities. The DH is happening at the level of socio- straints on that experience, today has much of the
technical infrastructure that aims to serve scholarly same scale, complexity, and general cultural impact
communities at a global scale and at the same time as the idea of “culture” itself’ (Liu, 2018a). This article
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embed into local structures. This causes a chain reac- constitutes an important contribution to the field be-
tion: A lack of tools supporting non-English languages cause it grounds the investigation of infrastructure in
hinders local work with resources in languages other the experience of culture. It situates the DH in broad-
than English. Poor digitization and documentation of based infrastructure studies and reveals the potential
cultural materials obstruct digital research. A lack of of DH as a unique field with the ability to critically
access to literature resources hinders scholarship. And intervene in a large array of knowledge infrastructures.
finally, insufficient budget makes it impossible to es- In a similar vein, James Smithies, a co-founder of
tablish a DH laboratory that supports the local devel- the Critical Infrastructures Studies initiative with Liu,
opment of the field. These simple examples have called for interrogating global humanities infrastruc-
obvious consequences, such as the underdevelopment ture through a systems analysis approach (Smithies,
of local DH initiatives, which lead to their continued 2017, p. 113). According to Smithies, it is important to
invisibility in the global representation of the field. It is understand the global system of cyberinfrastructure
thus imperative to increase the awareness that global because it determines the computationally intensive
infrastructural gaps are the main obstacles to forming methods, and thereby affects the nature of digital
a truly global community of practice. David Joseph knowledge. Drawing on Star’s (1999) ethnographic
Wrisley rightly observed that ‘the discussions of diver- study of infrastructure, Smithies carried out an in-
sity in digital humanities so far have focused on cul- depth analysis of the dynamic and multi-layered glo-
tural difference within educational environments that bal humanities cyberinfrastructure that is entangled
largely resemble each other from an infrastructural with socio-political discourses. The proposed method
perspective, rather than on global infrastructural dif- of system analysis is original and challenging, and it
ference itself’ (Wrisley, 2019). has the potential to open up new research avenues in
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the DH to explore both the materiality of global in-
infrastructural approaches to the DH, as evidenced frastructure and its influence on the local manufacture
by the establishment of collaborative research ini- of knowledge.
tiatives (e.g. the Minimal Computing group of the The next critical intervention in the study of DH
Global Outlook::DH set up in 2014, the Critical infrastructure was proposed by Wrisley, who provided
Infrastructures Studies collective established in insight into the regional development of DH practices
2018, and the Technodiversity Collective formed in Arab countries in the context of the globalized aca-
in 2020) and workshops and panel conferences demic environment (Wrisley, 2019). Wrisley
(e.g. the Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the addressed the question of how to more widely imple-
DH panel at the 2016 ADHO conference, the ment digital and open scholarly practices in the Arab
Interrogating Infrastructure symposium at King’s region, and by doing so, revealed technical and socio-
College London in 2016, and Digital Access, cultural divergences resulting from this incorporation.
Inclusion, and the Humanities event at the School These infrastructural divisions, in particular, come to
of Advanced Study of the University of London in the fore when developing transnational collaborations
2021). At least three publications have explicitly among partners who are embedded in divergent
called for the study of infrastructure in the DH. knowledge cultures and served by different sets of
In the fascinating paper ‘Toward Critical tools and materials (see e.g. MaDiH: Mapping
Infrastructure Studies’, Alan Liu presented an agenda Digital Heritage in Jordan project run by King’s
for examining infrastructure through the lens of DH Digital Lab, UK and Hashemite University, Jordan
(Liu, 2018a). Liu stated that the ‘digital humanities are [MaDiH, 2021]). As Wrisley argued, it is thus import-
uniquely placed to interpret and critique culture at the ant to ‘think about how to move beyond the question
level of infrastructure—where “infrastructure,” the of access to knowledge to the questions of what
4 of 17 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021Infrastructuring digital humanities
know-how is required to create knowledge anywhere upon which something else “runs” or “operates”, such
in the world and by what means can that knowledge be as a system of railroad tracks upon which rail cars run’
disseminated to anyone else in the world’ (Wrisley, (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). The attempt to uncover that
2019). which underlies something else involves delving into
The proposed approach entails exploring the global the invisible background of a thing that is responsible
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infrastructural landscape and becoming aware of tech- for its processes and mechanisms. This inquiry leads to
nical and socio-cultural differences across collaborat- embracing diverse analytical possibilities to reveal the
ing institutions, which may be related to insufficient relationship between practices and technologies con-
technical services, disruptions in Internet access, dif- tained in the infrastructural system. Such analysis also
ferent knowledge-management practices, and discrep- enables us to detect how things are processed, organ-
ancies in approaches to public open data. ized, and integrated. And by doing so, it reveals the
points of disintegration where infrastructure ‘ends’,
leaving some actors excluded from the system.
3 Infrastructuring DH Therefore, the promise of infrastructure lies in its con-
tinuous process of building and rebuilding
Over the years, STS scholars, science historians, and connections.
anthropologists have focused on studying infrastruc- As exemplified by STS work, infrastructure is not a
ture in the broadest sense, such as roads, railroads, fixed and neutral construction but rather a complex
waterworks, the Internet, information systems, digital and dynamic socio-material thing that is made up of
libraries, and data management platforms (Bowker, tensions and agreements between actors. Bowker et al.
1994; Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Bowker and Star, showed that the information infrastructure is a distri-
1999; Bowker et al., 2010; Star, 1999; Simone, 2004; bution of elements along technical–social and global–
Edwards et al., 2009, 2013; Larkin, 2013; Mongili and local axes: ‘The key question is not whether a problem
Pellegrino, 2014; Appel et al., 2015; Borgman, 2015; is a “social” problem or a “technical” one. That is
Harvey and Knox, 2015; Mattern, 2016; Ruby and putting it the wrong way around. The question is
Ruby, 2017; Anand et al., 2018). The growing body of whether we choose, for any given problem, a primarily
literature on the concept of infrastructure prompts the social or a technical solution, or some combination. It
questions of why infrastructure is essential for studying is the distribution of solutions that is of concern as the
people’s practices and what kinds of subjects are object of study and as a series of elements that support
embedded in the infrastructural system. These inquiries infrastructure in different ways at different moments’
have been central for STS scholars who have sought to (Bowker et al., 2010, p. 102). Socio-technical sub-
show that the concept of infrastructure is a productive strates are the components that both link the local
analytical tool that reveals the way the contemporary and global dimensions of the information infrastruc-
world is built, connected, and sustained. STS theorists ture and disclose divergences and disagreements be-
have seen infrastructure as a relational thing that can tween them. The infrastructural approach provides
help to disclose tensions and divergences present in therefore a useful analytical tool to trace the epistemic,
social life. As the authors of ‘The Infrastructure technological and social connections and interrogate
Toolbox’ project argued, ‘By attending to the forma- power dynamics at a global and local scale. It gives an
tion, maintenance, and breakdown of roads, water opportunity to think about how social situatedness
pipes, or electricity grids in everyday life, we can ask affects the way we learn and study, how the experience
how infrastructure helps us to theorize key anthropo- of the Internet can be both widened and limited by
logical questions about affect, aspiration, and imagin- language, and how geography and political relation-
ation; about modernity, development, and temporality; ships form the materiality of digital connection.
and about the production of states and markets, the STS scholars explicitly show how infrastructure is
public and the private’ (Appel et al., 2015). Scholars ‘co-produced’ by both social and technical elements
across different fields (e.g. media studies, DH, and cul- (Felt et al., 2017) and the local–global interrelations
tural studies) increasingly regard infrastructure as a (Agnew and Livingstone, 2011). The concept of co-
substrate—defined by Star and Ruhleder as ‘something production introduced by Sheila Jasanoff stresses ‘the
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021 5 of 17U. Pawlicka-Deger
constant intertwining of the cognitive, the material, lies in the critical act of ‘interrogating’ the components
the social and the normative’ (2004, p. 6). This frame- of infrastructure and ‘constructing’ their configura-
work discloses the varied and dynamic ‘interconnec- tions anew.
tions between the macro and the micro, between Introducing the STS view of relational infrastructure
emergence and stabilization, and between knowledge aims to open a discussion concerning the practice of
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and practice’ (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 4). STS literature ‘infrastructuring’ of the global dimension of DH. The
draws attention to infrastructure as a complex and notion of ‘infrastructuring’ in STS refers to an ongoing
relational thing made up of social, technological and process of creating, implementing, and using infra-
epistemic orders. Exploring ‘technical’ details of infra- structures, as well as to the collective practices that
structure requires, however, to disclose and under- manage a series of tensions between ‘local and global,
stand the broad conceptual ‘social’ implications of today’s requirements and tomorrow’s users, research
infrastructure that can heighten a sensitivity towards and development; between project and originating
‘how we classify the contents of the world, the onto- practices; implementation and maintenance/repair; in-
logical politics implicated in such ordering work, the dividual and community; but also identities and prac-
epistemic and material infrastructures built to estab- tices, planned and emergent courses of action’ (Mongili
lish new social orders’ (Felt et al., 2017, p. 23). and Pellegrino, 2014, pp. xxii–xxiii). Infrastructuring is
In the last decades, DH scholars have discussed in- an analytical concept that shifts attention from ‘struc-
frastructure in many respects informed by the Atkins ture’ to ‘process’ and has been applied in a number of
report on cyberinfrastructure for e-science (Atkins different research communities, including design fields
et al., 2003) and the Cultural Commonwealth report (Karasti, 2014; Karasti and Blomberg, 2018). It is
of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS, focused on the processes of continuous co-creation in
2006). These reports have introduced infrastructure as a the vein of participatory design (Hillgren et al., 2011;
technical thing that engages tools, services, resources, Björgvinsson et al., 2012; Le Dantec and DiSalvo, 2013)
and methods for digital research engagement with cul- that foregrounds public engagement, shared interest,
tural heritage content (Benardou et al., 2017). However, and long-term relationships with stakeholders to build
as Liu stresses, the word ‘infrastructure’ is a relational networks from which equal opportunities and new
concept that unpacks the broad range of social com- forms of connections can emerge. ‘Infrastructuring’ is
plexity (2018a). This perspective was a focal point for therefore a design-first approach characterized by the
discussions at the ‘Infrastructural Interventions’ work- following principles: community-led (the bottom-up
shop organized by the Critical Infrastructures Studies initiatives with little or no funding, e.g. Canadian
group and others in 2021 where leading thinkers in DH Writing Research Collaboratory), non-commercial
critically interrogated the nature and fragility of (managed by the scholarly community as a common
infrastructures at individual, social, and planetary good, e.g. Latin American Council of Social Sciences
scales, and attempted to reconfigure their nature from [CLACSO], open access infrastructure), co-creation
social justice, feminist, and decolonial perspectives (participatory approach to designing and developing
(CIStudies, 2021). an infrastructure, e.g. the Ticha digital platform
Therefore, I propose to look at the global DH from involves Zapotec language activists and members of
the perspective of conceptual STS that can help to the broader Zapotec communities in discussions about
reveal the high-level entanglement of infrastructure design decisions and priorities), ethical values (demo-
with social, economic, and political concerns before cratic and equal values, e.g. CUNY Digital History
delving into the substrate level of DH system. The Archive as collective knowledge infrastructure),
non-technical view of infrastructure aims to build a openness (initiatives promoting open access, open
fruitful dialogue with more technical-focused studies code, open content licenses, e.g. the Manifold platform
of DH (e.g. Smithies, 2017). This article aims therefore and Recogito tool by the Pelagios Network), diversity
to bring conceptual STS and anthropological perspec- (ensuring diversity of voices, participation and lan-
tives of infrastructure to the DH debate in order to guages, e.g. multilingual initiatives such as the
show that the ‘promise of infrastructure’ (Anand et al., Programming Historian and the SciELO Brazil
2018) to reimagine and rebuild the world differently Collection), and intervention (design values as critical
6 of 17 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021Infrastructuring digital humanities
and contestation approach, e.g. the Humanities linguistic diversity in the long-term development of
Networked Infrastructure and Enslaved.org platform). digital knowledge infrastructures (e.g. 28% of the
Using this concept, we can therefore gain insight into resources nominated for DH Awards in 2012 are no
how to design, build, and implement the infrastructure longer accessible—the links are broken or the sites are
required to support the formation of inclusive DH. no longer active, an alarming development given the
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Inclusive knowledge infrastructures comprise ‘the relatively short period of 8 years since the award);
tools, platforms, networks and other socio-technical supporting the development of digital tools and soft-
mechanisms that deliberately allow for multiple forms ware for working with materials in various languages
of participation amongst a diverse set of actors, and and formats (e.g. Multilingual DH, an international
which purposefully acknowledge and seek to redress network of scholars facilitating the use of DH tools
power relations within a given context’ (Okune et al., and methods in languages other than English);
2018). Infrastructuring DH is thus the process of mak- enhancing dialogues and collaborations between di-
ing strong connections between communities so that vergent communities by promoting inclusive debates
they can evenly access digital knowledge resources, use and working to create a shared set of vocabularies to
these resources to work with local materials, equally improve mutual communication and understanding
participate in the formation of knowledge, and share (e.g. Global Outlook::DH special working group of
it with the global community. DH scholars have strong- ADHO helping to break down barriers that hinder
ly contributed to designing and creating single nodes of communication and collaboration among researchers
global knowledge infrastructural networks. Therefore, and students around the world).
it is incumbent on them, as individuals, to reflect crit- In face of the COVID-19, scholars formed ‘tempor-
ically on what kind of social values and ways of thinking ary’ infrastructures that aimed to improve intercon-
and working are embedded in planned infrastructures, nectedness and equal access to knowledge resources.
how they can redistribute the power and authority in They have shown that a different global system of
the global system of knowledge production, and how knowledge production and dissemination is therefore
they can eventually contribute to the reconfiguration of possible. In the section that follows, I will discuss three
the global representation of digital knowledge. dimensions of knowledge infrastructure that can help
Thinking about the global DH as interconnected to understand the conditions and challenges for the
local nodes can help build an inclusive network on top formation of globally connected DH.
of the geopolitical system of infrastructure. I thus en-
courage DH scholars to consider the following issues,
which can be taken up individually and supported 4 The Complex System of
collectively: strengthening open scholarship practices Infrastructure Inequities
by opening resources to local projects and initiatives
(e.g. data, codes, publications, video lectures, educa- 4.1 Connection
tional materials) on Creative Commons licenses in the Degree of connectivity constitutes a measurement of
repositories and platforms accessible to communities success: the more a person is connected, the more they
(e.g. the recently launched ‘Digital Pedagogy in the are included in social life. To become included in the
Humanities’, an open-access, curated collection of re- global system of knowledge, one must have access to
usable and re-mixable resources for teaching and re- solid technical infrastructures that are entangled with
search with digital technologies); facilitating the political, economic, and social influences. The devel-
development of local digital infrastructure interoper- opment of the global DH requires a deep understand-
able with both a larger international digital network ing of infrastructural affordances and constraints on
and the digitization of cultural heritage materials with ‘being connected’. The expansion of infrastructure
a focus on ethical and legal concerns; supporting the raises a question of connectivity: how much do we
sustainability of digital projects and infrastructural need to expand the system to enable communities to
efforts to ensure the maintenance of cultural and be connected?
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021 7 of 17U. Pawlicka-Deger
The Open Infrastructure Map shows how the distribution. Technical aspects that make global com-
world’s hidden infrastructures—telecoms, power, munication possible are important factors in building
water, oil, and gas—are unevenly allocated the international DH community and fostering col-
(OIM, n.d.) and how their distribution and density laborations across regions and economies. The level of
relate to geopolitical dynamics. The Northern connectedness and cooperation in the field is highly
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Hemisphere’s infrastructures are considerably denser relational and depends upon the frame of reference of
and wider than those in the Southern Hemisphere. In an observer.
this context, it is worth noting the Zooniverse crowd- If digital infrastructure takes the form of cables or
sourced project ‘Power to the People’, conducted by buttons, it is easy to switch it off. Internet access thus
the University of Oxford, Satellite Applications becomes a perfect political tool used to disconnect
Catapult, and Earth-I, which invites people to identify people from information. Particularly in a time of
rural homes on the maps of Africa’s cities to help to social unrest, governments seek to find ways to shut
design better rural electrical grids (Power to the down the Internet. By doing so, they remind us how
People, n.d.). The Open Infrastructure Map and the seemingly immaterial the Internet is, when in fact it is
Zooniverse project explicitly show the materiality of a tangible actor involved in the political dynamics of
digital infrastructures—the physical distribution of power relations (Hurst, 2013). The materiality of
Internet lines, cables for wired broadband connec- digital infrastructure was explicitly articulated by
tions, and specific locations of Wi-Fi hotspots. The Nishant Shah, who critically examined the role of
normally hidden technical substrates have become no- the DH in the face of political agitation in the city of
ticeable upon breakdown, as evidenced by the Ahmedabad that led to an unprecedented Internet
COVID-19 outbreak which has exposed the varying shutdown in the entire state of Gujarat in 2015.
degrees of connectivity in the global system and the Drawing from the state-wide Internet shutdown in
‘endpoints’ of infrastructure networks. We rarely the face of a crisis, Shah developed the idea of a dis-
think about digital practices in the category of materi- connected subject, defining it as a ‘subject who has all
ality; they seem rather immaterial and placeless. the rights of access and visibility but will be controlled,
However, drawing on Shannon Mattern’s concept of contained, and censored through digital disconnect-
infrastructural tourism (Mattern, 2013), we can real- edness and interruption’ (Shah, 2019). So far, the no-
ize that digital networks are, in fact, tangible and vis- tion of disconnection has been largely unexplored in
ible, and the nexus of technical assemblages the DH because, as Shah said, ‘it doesn’t necessarily fit
determines the affordances of our work. into the larger rhetoric of a subject-to-be-connected
If we place the Open Infrastructure Map and maps that forms the heart of digital humanities’ (Shah,
of DH institutions (centerNet, 2007; Terras, 2012; 2019). The promise of the DH is to build a connected
Pawlicka-Deger, 2019) side by side, we can see how and equitable community; therefore, connectivity
they overlap. That said, it is necessary to keep in mind constitutes a focal point in debates about the global
that global maps of DH institutions do not provide a dimension of the field. Shah argued, however, that ‘to-
complete picture of the digital scholarship carried out be-connected or already-connected subjects’ present
in the world, and they should not be treated as refer- in the discussions limit research inquiries because they
ences that give an exhaustive global landscape of the ‘often miss out on the new regime of digital regulation
field. For example, none of the maps of DH activities and control that is being organized’ (2019). As a result,
include various DH initiatives in India mapped by Shah proposed to open up a new critical direction in
Shanmugapriya T and Nirmala Menon (2020). We the field called a ‘post-access digital humanities’,
can study the global connectivity in the DH by ana- which would focus on digital disconnection, regimes
lysing the distribution of institutions, authorship pat- of digital control, infrastructure monitoring, and life
terns in scholarly journals, collaboration networks in in a post-surveillance society.
digital projects, and members of international organ- Poor access to electricity, Internet, and technology,
izations. Although these attempts seek to represent the as well as a lack of access to international research,
cultural and regional diversity that exists, they do not, insufficient training in digital practices, and a lack of
however, reveal the underlying reasons for this funding support (Aiyegbusi, 2018; Shah, 2019;
8 of 17 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021Infrastructuring digital humanities
Wrisley, 2019), underlie the uneven development of requires responsive and flexible standards, as Susan
DH at a local level and poor connectivity between Brown said, ‘Standards need to be socially and intel-
communities at a global scale. Connection is a pre- lectually responsible and responsive, and standards
requisite for forming a diverse and inclusive network bodies need to be transparent in their governance
of DH communities. However, a high degree of con- and decision-making processes’ (Brown, 2016).
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nectivity is contingent upon solid technical infrastruc- In terms of institutional infrastructures, the aca-
tures, and DH scholars are unable to fix all the demic knowledge production system is based on the
underlying conditions that lead to insufficient local standardization: many literature resources are pro-
infrastructure. The reasons for inadequate technical duced in Microsoft Word, shared through Google
infrastructure are complex and deeply rooted in the Drive service, and presented by using the Microsoft
political and economic relations that determine the PowerPoint program. This trend called ‘platformisa-
distribution and positioning system of messy tion’ means ‘the construction of a single digital system
Internet cables. that acts as a technical monopoly within a particular
sector’ (Berry and Fagerjord, 2017, p. 245). The cen-
4.2 Standardization tralization of platforms used by universities has been
Standard is ‘any set of agreed-upon rules for the pro- particularly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic.
duction of (textual or material) objects’ (Bowker and Scholars from around the world have communicated
Star, 1999) that enables things to work together over using the same digital platforms, such as Slack,
heterogeneous systems. The standardization process is Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. The last application
a prerequisite for international connections and sus- constitutes a particular example of the unification of
tainability as it builds a bridge between different com-
tools across divergent communities and sectors all
munities and facilitates their collaboration. To some
over the world. Zoom, originally created for enterprise
extent, the standardization aims to play the role of a
customers, has become the main communication
common language that makes knowledge exchange
platform used during the pandemic for a wide range
and integration possible. It is an important feature
of meetings, from school classes to academic seminars
of infrastructure that aims to connect and serve vari-
to official government summits. Although the com-
ous groups of people. The process of linking diverse
pany has been able to successfully adjust their service
systems into compatible networks entails, however,
to accommodate millions of users on short notice, the
creating the borders and leaving behind those not fit-
ting into the created uniform system of standards and pandemic crisis has revealed a lack of communication
protocols. Therein lies the risk of standardization. platforms that bridge people from all over the world.
In standardizing global knowledge, the techniques The academic world moving into the Zoom environ-
and procedures that are not incompatible are sup- ment has been a clear demonstration of how strongly
pressed, which consequently leads to the homogeniza- academia is embedded in the global commercial sys-
tion of a global knowledge system. DH scholars have tem. This raises serious issues of privacy and security.
been well aware of the benefits of standards as well as Zoom has become the main communication plat-
the risk of cultural, linguistic, and methodological form, leaving behind non-commercial, free, and
universalism (Brown, 2016; Fiormonte, 2016; open-source tools, such as Collective Tools or Jiitsi.
Ricaurte, 2019). As the field that cultivates the import- The pandemic crisis has uncovered longstanding ten-
ance of diversity of perspectives and methods, it has sions between the standardization and commercializa-
struggled with maintaining heterogeneous norms in tion of infrastructure in the academic system and
the ever-increasing standardized world. DH stands compelled scholars to rethink ethical technologies
thus in-between technical standardization and resist- for research and pedagogy (see the Ethical EdTech
ance to universalization and systematization. With the project that identifies tools for ethical pedagogy
rapidly developing technologies, new modes of know- [Ethical EdTech, n.d.]) and reconsider the engineering
ledge production have emerged, which lead to changes of technical products to become independent from
in the methodological and ontological dimensions of commercial or government software developers (see
the nature of the knowledge system. This in turn Smithies, 2017).
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021 9 of 17U. Pawlicka-Deger
The process of standardization can lead to the uni- instance, the visualization of the locations of academic
fication of tools in terms of language. Holly Young, in journals listed in Thomson Reuters’ Web of
her fascinating article ‘The digital language divide. Knowledge, shows that the USA and the UK publish
How does the language you speak shape your experi- more indexed journals than the rest of the world com-
ence of the internet?’ showed how the Internet is an bined (2011, p. 14). The next graphic visualizes the
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English-dominant environment and how this affects role that language plays within the reproduction of
the ways of perceiving the world through the Internet. academic knowledge in scientific journals and dem-
As Young said, while there are 6,000 languages in use onstrates the pure dominance of the English language
today, Google search works for just over 130 different in academic publishing (Graham et al., 2011, p. 16).
languages (Young, n.d.). Furthermore, she pointed The set of maps display that ‘much of the world
out that Wikipedia exhibits huge asymmetries in the remains, both literally and figuratively, absent from
volume of online content in different language edi- the global map of knowledge’ (Graham et al., 2011,
tions: ‘Out of the 288 official language editions, p. 7). The homogenization of languages in academic
English is by some distance the largest edition in terms journals is also evidenced by the Directory of Open
of users, followed by German and then French. On the Access Journals where, as Gimena del Rio Riande
other side of the spectrum, there is a near absence of showed, for a total of 15,037 indexed journals, 6,689
any content in many African and Asian languages’ represent English monolingual journals, 1,040—
(Young, n.d.). The language a person speaks deter- Spanish, and 740—Portuguese (del Rio Riande,
mines what kind of resources they use because not 2021).
all software and tools support non-English languages. The short-term challenges for equitable standard-
For instance, Wrisley has observed the deficiency of ization—the insufficiency of software for supporting
software and platform development for Arabic- non-English languages, the dependence on standar-
language content: ‘Basic blog platforms such as dized commercial platforms and services, and the
WordPress indeed now support right-to-left direc- lack of tools and solutions for proper digitization of
tional languages such as Arabic, but other basic infra- cultural data—lead to long-term consequences,
structural elements that have facilitated the expansion including the hegemony of the North/West centre in
of online publishing cultures elsewhere—e-readers, the academic system of knowledge production, the
XML for publishing or digital critical editions, print homogenization of scholarly methods and outcomes,
on demand, electronic payment systems—are shock- and the underrepresentation of cultural heritage data
ingly underdeveloped’ (Wrisley, 2019). It has become of indigenous and ethnic minorities in digital collec-
clear that the language people speak, read, and write tions. These disturbing problems on the dangerously
affects what kind of information they collect and, con- global level ought to become a focal point for wider
sequently, determines the way they learn and conduct discussions about infrastructural challenges in the
research. DH.
The need for standardization poses ethical, social,
and political questions about the homogeneity and 4.3 Access
inequity in academic knowledge production. The To enhance diversity and equality in the DH field, it is
dominance of English and North American-based important to understand the underlying reasons for
knowledge infrastructures, ranging from tools to aca- the uneven distribution of access to resources and de-
demic journals to publishers, has led to the fact that velop ethical bottom-up ways to enable various com-
‘the geographies of knowledge remain largely charac- munities to be included in the advancement of the
terized by strong core-periphery patterns’ (Graham field at a global level. Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan
et al., 2011). In ‘Geographies of the World’s Gray explicitly showed that ‘open access is intensely
Knowledge’, Graham et al. presented a set of visual- messy’ (2020, p. 10) and the issue of accessibility and
izations showing dimensions of the global distribution openness raise ongoing and complex questions that
of knowledge. The series of maps are striking as they are deeply entangled with economic, political, and
reveal a staggering amount of inequality and bias in socio-cultural concerns. What kind of data and
the system of academic knowledge production. For resources should be accessible and for whom? ‘How
10 of 17 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021Infrastructuring digital humanities
many of the university students learning and research- various forms of initiatives, such as funding policies,
ing from home or in halls of residence have been able university mandates, and grassroots actions promot-
to consult the digitized collections that they need? ing the open access movement. From the Open Access
Who has decided what does and does not warrant Map by the Open Access Scholarly Information
digitization, and how much access to digitized mater- Sourcebook (Open Access Map, n.d.) and the Open
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ial will cost?’ (SAS, 2021). The move towards ‘open- Journal Systems (OSJ) map (OJS, n.d.), we can ob-
ness’ of resources and knowledge is a significant step serve how this movement has been expanding around
towards democratizing global access to knowledge the world. The latter map presents the development of
and what we need is to build collective and coopera- the location of journals that use OJS from 1990 to
tive infrastructures, architectures, and ethics that will 2019. In 1990, the number of journals using OJS was
aim to ‘foster a new intellectual economy, a collectivist 668. By 2019, this number had significantly increased
network that scholars both support and lead’ to 4,214. The Open Access Map, in turn, shows a clear
(Fitzpatrick, 2020, p. 357). direction of development in the academic publishing
The condition for creating a collaborative and in- system that represents a positive global shift towards
clusive DH community is therefore an even distribu- free and equal access to knowledge resources. In par-
tion of access to educational resources, research, and ticular, open access publishing in Latin America rep-
cultural heritage data. This, in turn, requires infra- resents the robust community-based movement
structure that enables open and equal access to learn- towards open scholarly communications as exempli-
ing, teaching, and scholarly materials. The Open fied by the initiatives, such as RedALyC (network of
Knowledge Foundation defines ‘open’ as the state of non-commercial Open Access scientific journals) and
content when anyone can freely access, use, modify, CLACSO. As CLACSO’s Open Access Advisor
and share it for any purpose (The Open Definition, Dominique Babini explained, ‘The main drivers of
n.d.). The DH has taken a strong position in the Open Access in Latin America have been public uni-
debates about open cultural data and open research versities and government organizations, with no out-
and becomes advocates for equal and transparent ac- sourcing to commercial publishers’ (Babini, 2019).
cess to resources. Openness has become a distinctive For many researchers and students, however, ac-
value of the field, which has also strongly contributed cess to journal articles, monographs, and textbooks is
to the development of open infrastructures: open- unaffordable because these resources are hidden be-
source software tools (e.g. Zotero, Voyant), open- hind expensive paywalls. The cost of access strongly
source publishing platforms (e.g. Manifold, Scalar), depends on institutional, regional, and national sit-
open-access journals (e.g. DH Quarterly, Digital uatedness. In other words, the location where a person
Studies/le Champ Numérique’), and open repositories lives, studies, and works affects the extent to which
(for example, Humanities Commons’ CORE reposi- they can access knowledge resources. It determines
tory, MediArXiv Preprints, SciELO Data). The broad- whether they can afford to buy books available on
based implementation of the idea of openness has also Amazon for the sluice-gate price in foreign currency.
become a subject of critical debate with an eye towards And it determines whether they can pay for 24-h ac-
the epistemology of openness in different cultural cess to scholarly articles, whose price may correspond
environments (e.g. in the context of Indigenous peo- to their daily allowance. In this academic climate, stu-
ple in Australia [Bowrey and Anderson, 2009], in dents struggle to acquire literature resources, and
Africa [Piron, 2018], and in Arab countries [Wrisley, many look for innovative solutions to avoid paying
2019]). There is also considerable debate about open- full price for textbooks, including illegally download-
ing access to indigenous cultural heritage data ing textbooks for free, renting from book publishers,
(Earhart, 2018b), the lack of international harmoniza- and buying used books (Lumpkin, 2020). The cost of
tion of copyright law, and access control in the aca- access to knowledge resources is a huge barrier for
demic publishing system (Fiormonte, 2017). those who come from low-income families, are in
Open access, a set of practices through which re- debt, or have to pay in foreign currency. For users,
search outputs are accessible to everyone free of the paywall is the only visible aspect of knowledge
charge, has been springing up across the world in infrastructure; what is happening behind the wall
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021 11 of 17U. Pawlicka-Deger
remains invisible. On this hidden side, a power game North. As Florence Piron stated in the thought-
between universities and publishers shapes the system provoking article ‘Postcolonial Open Access’, ‘In add-
of academic knowledge production. ition, Africa’s scientific development aid, if needed,
The main players controlling the creation and dis- should be directed less towards immediate access to
semination of academic knowledge are for-profit pub- journals from the North and more towards the devel-
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lishing companies, such as Elsevier, Springer, and opment of digital tools and skills in African univer-
Wiley-Blackwell. These publishers control a large sities’ (Piron 2018, p. 126). This would require a
amount of the academic publishing market number of policy actions, such as providing stable
(Graham et al., 2011) and exert power at every stage access to electricity, Internet access, computer equip-
of the academic knowledge-production cycle (Posada ment, financial support to local scientific journals, and
and Chen, 2018). The large publishing companies research grants for local knowledge production.
have monopolized the academic publishing market An important step that must accompany the open
and formed a system in which universities are obliged access movement is fostering the development of local
to make two payments: First, they pay expensive sub- infrastructures that can ensure equal opportunities to
scription fees to have access to journal articles, and participate both as authors and readers in the global
second, they pay a charge to publish manuscripts on academic environment. The approach towards an
an open-access basis. A ‘global flip’ to an open-access ‘openness’ is a complex question; however, it is a
system, seeking to abolish the monopoly of big pub- promising direction towards achieving epistemic just-
lishers, has been triggered by the Plan S initiative ice and an inclusive academic community. As Denisse
established in 2018 by a group of (mainly European) Albornoz et al. rightly stated, ‘The infrastructures we
research funders known as cOAlitionS. ‘Plan S build and the practices we enable need to intentionally
requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that include voices, worldviews, and epistemologies that
result from research funded by public grants must be have been historically excluded from the system’
published in compliant Open Access journals or plat- (2020, p. 72).
forms’ (Plan S, n.d.). This ambitious initiative
attempts to shift the publishing system to a completely
new business model by moving the costs from pay-to- 5 Conclusion
read to pay-to-publish.
Plan S has become an advocate for a human right In the most recent decade, the DH has been significant-
to have access to knowledge, but this initiative has not ly expanded through the establishment of new organ-
been left without questions. The main criticism relates izations (e.g. the DH Alliance for Research and
to a possible division of researchers into those who can Teaching Innovations in India, DHARTI founded in
afford to pay for publication and those who struggle to 2018), the development of geographically distributed
do so. Richard Poynder (a critic of the open access collaboration networks (e.g. the Implementing New
movement) argued, ‘APCs [Article processing Knowledge Environments Partnership research net-
charges] range in price from several hundred to over work with the goal of fostering open social scholarship
$5,000 per article. This is unfeasible for the Global formed in 2009), and the development of international
South and so researchers would be excluded in a dif- partnerships (e.g. King’s Digital Lab’s collaborative
ferent (but more pernicious) way than they are under project with Hashemite University to analyse Jordan’s
the subscription system: free to read research pub- digital cultural heritage infrastructure). The expansion
lished in international journals but unable to publish of digital practices in the humanities has given rise to
in them’ (Poynder, 2019). This disparity could widen debate about the global representation of the field and
the gap between scholars from developed countries or criticism regarding the dominance of North- and West-
big institutions and researchers from low-income based institutions, the hegemony of the English lan-
countries or smaller universities. This line of criticism guage in the scholarly environment, and collaborative
perceives open access as a tool of neocolonialism be- works conducted along a primarily East–West axis.
cause it amounts to giving students and academics in In this essay, I sought to rethink the development
the Global South better access to science from the of global DH and approach it with STS methods.
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