0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 10/13)

The danger that should concern researchers is what Understanding Infrastructure calls premature fixing of infrastructure.

Given its relative immaturity and the rapidly changing technological backdrop against which cyberinfrastructure is unfolding, efforts not to prematurely “sink” or “fix” the form and vision of cyberinfrastructure (or distinct cyberinfrastructure projects) should be supported. (p. 42)

When some research tool is redefined as infrastructure, researchers lose control over its formation. Turning into infrastructure shifts responsibility from researchers to the research infrastructure profession. The turn also changes what can get funded. If, for example, translations were to be seen to be infrastructure, we might find that we couldn’t get research grants to do them—that would be the responsibility of infrastructure professionals.

Image by Stan Ruecker

Tools are reinvented as we reinterpret

A pernicious version of the argument for shifting things like tool development over to infrastructure goes that we need to stop “reinventing wheels” as if that was what happens when research tools are redeveloped. The suggestion is that humanists have a tendency to reinvent things uselessly when it would be more efficient to hand the job over to professional software engineers who would do a better job and do it once and for all. Maybe. Setting aside the fact that wheels are reinvented over and over, to fit new models of cars, the reinvention of meaning is exactly what characterizes the humanities. Tools are not used to extract meaning according to objective principles. In the humanities we reinvent ways of making meaning within traditions. McGann and Samuels argue something similar in “Deformation and Interpretation”: “Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate—the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something—what Blake here assertively proposes: that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data...” (p. 48). We are in the maintenance by reinvention and reinterpretation business and we don’t want our methods and tools to become invisible as they are part of the research. To shift tool development from researchers to infrastructure providers is to direct the attention of humanities research away and to surrender some of the research independence we value. To shift the boundary that defines what is legitimate research and what isn’t is something humanists should care passionately about and resist where it constrains inquiry. I can understand the impatience funders may have with the plodding iterative ways of the humanities—do we really need another interpretation of Plato—but that just means that we humanists have to do a better job explaining the value of reinterpretation rather than allow the organizational boundaries to be moved.

Infrastructure is a boundary interpretation

This brings us to the issue of sustainability. Ironically, it is the reinvention of the humanities that is its most robust form of sustainability in the humanities. The humanities sustain traditions of performance and interpretation not by fixing them in infrastructure but by continually reinventing them. Plato is not an archaeological park which, once surveyed, can be safely preserved for future visitors as philosophical infrastructure complete with an “interpretative center.” He is a source of ongoing, and often creative, reinterpretation, and that is what sustains interest in Plato. The death of Plato would be when we tire of reinventing his tradition and move on. To prematurely turn humanities computing questions, quarrels, inventions, deformations and challenges into infrastructure risks taking them out of the play that is the humanities at the very moment when they matter. As a computing humanist involved in experiments in analytics I struggle with the question of when to let go of the play for the good of the infrastructure of others.