0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 9/13)

Infrastructure is a change in funding model

The reason for this shift is that we have a growing-up problem in the digital humanities, and one that has been noted under a different rubric. The crude way to put it is that we are drowning in our own research poop. The more sophisticated digital works we create, the more there is that has to be maintained and maintained at much greater cost than just shelving a book and occasionally rebinding it. Centers and institutes get to the point that they can't do anything new because maintaining what they have done is consuming all their resources. One way to solve that problem is to convince libraries to take your digital editions, but many of us don’t have libraries with the cyberinfrastructure. Another way to deal with this is to define certain tools as cyberinfrastructure so that they are understood as things that need ongoing support by organizations funded over the long term. If the scale is right we might even have an economy of scale so that we could all pay for a common organization to maintain the commonwealth of infrastructure, and that is one read of what Bamboo is trying to do: determine what things are needed in common for research and then develop a consortium that could develop and sustain them for us at a cost we can afford if spread around. See the Project Bamboo web site for more on this initiative. It is too early to say exactly what the infrastructure they develop will look like, but the rhetoric is very much about developing tools in the cloud as infrastructure and distributing the costs over a wide consortium. A worthy goal that may be too late or just in time, given the fiscal storm that could redefine higher education.

Dangers of infrastructure

However, there are dangers to such redefinition. This is not the place to discuss all the dangers of infrastructure, so I am going to list a few and focus on one in particular, which is the losing of research to infrastructure. But first, a reminder of some of the usual dangers of infrastructure to offset the almost universal call for more of it:

• Research infrastructure is not research just as roads are not economic activity. We tend to forget when confronted by large infrastructure projects that they are not an end in themselves. There is an opportunity cost to investing precious research funds into infrastructure. Every $100,000 lab that lasts four years before needing renewal is the equivalent to $25,000 a year for a Ph.D. student to do research for four years.
• Infrastructure projects can become ends in themselves by developing into an industry that promotes continued investment. To sustain infrastructure there develops a class of people whose jobs are tied to infrastructure investment. You can get situations, as one does in municipal politics, where ongoing infrastructure investment forms a political feedback loop (otherwise called corruption), where politicians spend money on construction because the construction companies reliably provide election funding back. There is currently a scandal around road construction spending in Montreal. See stories like “Corruption scandal’s web ensnares struggling ADQ” (Rhéal Séguin, The Globe and Mail online, Oct. 28, 2009). The point is that you can get a community invested in maintaining infrastructure not for research, but for their continued existence.
• Infrastructure needs to be maintained. Any investment in infrastructure carries the expectation that if that infrastructure is useful it can expect reinvestment. That, of course, is the reason for shifting projects from research to infrastructure, because the nature of the project calls for sustained funding, but the fiscal reality is that if every project is treated like infrastructure then at some point there is no loose funding left for new projects. We either build infrastructure and don’t maintain it, as people have argued is happening with your physical infrastructure, or we end up so heavily committed to maintenance that there is no room for research innovation. It seems to me that most funders want, like absent fathers, to seed the infrastructure and then step away from maintaining it by insisting that the applicants have sustainability plans, few of which really work. Christopher Makie has an article, “Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability,” that reflects on models for maintaining what we build.
• Infrastructure can distort the field and alter the ecology of a field . Highways are a good example. The postwar boom in highway building changed our relationship to the car and where we live. Interstate highways were matched by state highways, which were matched by municipal highways, many of which were driven through vibrant neighborhoods so as to make it easy for the middle class to leave town for the suburbs. It is no longer clear that we benefited from the modernist shift to a suburban, detached-house-and-cars lifestyle that was facilitated by massive road building in the 50s and 60s, not to mention the destruction of older neighborhoods, ravines, and gutting of city centers. Much of this expensive infrastructure development was, at the time, perceived as needed for economic modernization. Only those whose neighborhoods were cleaned up and replaced with projects complained. What if North America had seen massive investment in mass transit infrastructure comparable to Europe’s? While the sins of highway infrastructure investments are not the point of this essay, titles like Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Gutfreund, Owen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) suggest that we should beware of the redefining that infrastructure investments can lead to. How confident are we that massive research infrastructure won’t likewise change the ecology of research in unpredictable ways?