0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 8/13)

One can see this redefinition of cyberinfrastructure in the humanities also in the Mellon supported report, Our Cultural Commonwealth . The summary page where you can download the report is dominated by the answer to the question “What is Cyberinfrastructure? ” The answer provided is:

“Cyberinfrastructure” is more than just hardware and software, more than bigger computer boxes and wider pipes and wires connecting them. The term was coined by NSF to describe the new research environments in which capabilities of the highest level of computing tools are available to researchers in an interoperable network. These environments will be built, and ACLS feels it is important for the humanities and social sciences to participate in their design and construction. Ed Ayers has commented that much of the work of developing the Valley of the Shadow was analogous to building a printing press when none existed. Effective cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences will allow scholars to focus their intellectual and scholarly energies on the issues that engage them, and to be effective users of new media and new technologies, rather than having to invent them.

“Cyberinfrastructure” becomes less mysterious once we reflect that scholarship already has an infrastructure. The foundation of that infrastructure consists of the libraries, archives, and museums that preserve information; the bibliographies, finding aids, citation systems, and concordances that make that information retrievable; the journals and university presses that distribute the information; and the editors, librarians, archivists, and curators who link the operation of this structure to the scholars who use it. All of these structures have both extensions and analogues in the digital realm. The infrastructure of scholarship was built over centuries with the active participation of scholars. Cyberinfrastructure will be built more quickly, and so it is especially important to have broad scholarly participation in its construction: after it is built, it will be much harder to shift, alter, or improve its foundations. (ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure summary page, (External Link) id=644 ).

Note how the commission drew on the work of the 2003 NSF report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure . In Our Cultural Commonwealth, they draw on the Atkins report (as the NSF report is known) for a definition of infrastructure, one that to some extent determines the outcome.

In other words, for the Atkins report (and for this one), cyberinfrastructure is more than a tangible network and means of storage in digitized form, and it is not only discipline-specific software applications and project-specific data collections. It is also the more intangible layer of expertise and the best practices, standards, tools, collections and collaborative environments that can be broadly shared across communities of inquiry. (Page 6)

It is also worth noting how the ACLS Commission writes a history to CI arguing that libraries, finding aids, journals and so on are already existing infrastructure, and cyberinfrastructure is just the extension of what we expect into the digital realm. Many of these things like concordances and dictionaries we would call (following SSHRC) “research tools.” Others, like digital editions of content, I would call just editions. Few would have called them infrastructure except in the weakest sense of something that others build on. What changed was how these things have to be funded. A good print concordance or critical edition can be treated as a project. Once it is done, you print it, sell it to libraries, close down the project and move on. Not so with digital editions or digital tools. They, it seems, need to be maintained perpetually to be accessible at all—you can’t print a bunch of copies, put them in libraries, and let the librarians deal with the maintenance.