0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 2/13)

The establishment of CFI and the turn toward infrastructure anticipated a similar reorientation elsewhere in the research world, notably in the United States, where the 2003 “Atkins Report” of the National Science Foundation, entitled Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure , promised an extraordinary transformation in research environments, and presumably also research, if there was appropriate investment and organization of cyberinfrastructure (CI). This report was followed by Our Cultural Commonwealth in 2006, which advocated for innovative CI in the humanities and interpretative social sciences. As David Green put it in an introductory article on the issue of CI for the liberal arts, “This is going to be big.” This is how Green starts his article “Cyberinfrastructure For Us All: An Introduction to Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts” which introduces a special issue on the subject. Other articles in the issue are also worth reading. See (External Link) . He goes on to quote Arden Bement of the National Science Foundation, who wrote that the CI Revolution “is expected to usher in a technological age that dwarfs everything we have yet experienced in its sheer scope and power." The Bement quote is from remarks he gave on “Shaping the Cyberinfrastructure Revolution: Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation” which have been published in First Monday. Likewise in the UK, a programme for e-Science, as they call infrastructure broadly, was set up in 2001, and in Europe there is a European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures that has been developing initiatives. Regarding e-Science under “About the UK e-Science Programme,” the UK e-Science web site describes how “The e‑Science Core Programme … has supported the development of generic technologies, such as the software known as middleware that is needed to enable very different resources to work together seamlessly across networks and create computing grids.” (External Link) . For the ESFRI see (External Link) .

All of this activity and planning on our behalf should prompt researchers in the humanities to ask exactly what (cyber)infrastructure is or could be so that we might understand how it might be revolutionary and whether we want this revolution. As Peter Freeman puts it in an article on designing and defining cyberinfrastructure, “ Cyberinfrastructure can have many definitions and, to some extent, the definition is in the eye of the beholder .” Freeman, “Is ‘Designing’ Cyberinfrastructure — or, Even, Defining It — Possible?” The emphasis is his. In fact, this quote is centered, bolded, italicized and in blue on the web page just in case we miss it. This paper will therefore step back and look at the infrastructure turn, as I call the revolution, before we go too far down that road, so to speak. The paper will look at the idea of research infrastructure in the humanities in four passes:

• First, a look at traditional infrastructure like roads, so they can help us understand what cyberinfrastructure is. How is the call for information infrastructure drawing on our understanding of the infrastructure we know?
• Second, a look at the characteristics of infrastructure and some of the definitions offered.
• Third, I will look at the dangers in general and especially the issue of the turn from research to research infrastructure. I will argue that we need to be careful about defining the difference and avoid moving into the realm of infrastructure those things we are still studying.
• Finally, I will give as an example of the moving models of research and infrastructure the area of text analysis tools.