0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 6/13)

Sustainability and governance is likewise an issue for cyberinfrastructure. When applying to CFI it is actually not the researchers who apply, but the universities that apply (with a researcher as a project leader). CFI requests ongoing maintenance plans, expects the university to take ownership, and does provide some additional funding, though most feel it is not enough. Edwards et al., in a must-read report that came out of a workshop bringing historians and social scientists to bear on CI, argue the importance of the social to infrastructure:

It is also possible that a tech-centered approach to the challenge of data sharing inclines us toward failure from the beginning, because it leaves untouched underlying questions of incentives, organization, and culture that have in fact always structured the nature and viability of distributed scientific work. Questions of trust loom large here, and run both ways. (Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design, p. 32)

It is therefore important to think of infrastructure realistically as some mix of hard visible components, softer services, and professionals that operate and maintain the two. I suspect that the largest part of the costs for the cyberinfrastructure proposed for the humanities will go to people, not hardware or buying services. This is despite the perception that when you invest in infrastructure you are buying the hard stuff, like roads.

Policies that make interchange, like standards

Digging another level down, one finds that essential to certain types of cyberinfrastructure are the standards, policies, and procedures that allow us to run the infrastructure. It matters that electricity is provided at a standard and advertised voltage. Governments have zoning laws, policies, and procedures for handling construction both of the infrastructure they will maintain and for those who build new developments on infrastructure.

In computing we see the importance of standards in technologies like the World Wide Web. What makes virtual infrastructure like the web work is not one cable or one web browser, but the W3C standards that let different tools work together. The story we tell about the web as infrastructure is that all it took is HTTP and HTML to spark the collaborative and open development of information infrastructure. This is the lightest type of infrastructure, where there is no material or service base to maintain, but a base of definitions and standards on which others build layers. This is the most attractive paradigm for infrastructure for funders, as it is the least expensive to maintain. Perhaps things like the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines are the real infrastructure of humanities computing, and consortia like the TEI are the future for light and shared infrastructure maintenance.

Defining cyberinfrastructure again

Having looked at paradigms for what infrastructure is, I will now turn to how it is defined, because I am going to argue that the act of defining is a political one that shifts the boundary of what is in and out. The act of defining things as infrastructure positions them as things like roads, utility services, organizations and standards. That in turn triggers expectations about the value and support needed for the infrastructure. Calling something infrastructure is not a neutral act; it turns that thing into something that: