Expanded Infrastructure: Processes and Interconnections

In the digital humanities, one of the most interesting analyses of infrastructure as a concept is a three-tiered model suggested by Patrik Svensson that consists of a conceptual cyberinfrastructure, which is understood as the use of ideas to develop certain material infrastructure; design principles, which are used to organize and connect those ideas to produce the expected outcomes; and the actual cyberinfrastructure, which refers to what is actually produced.6 Svensson formulated his model based on his own experience in the HUMLab, “a digital humanities laboratory in the North of Sweden . . . , situated in a comprehensive research university, Umeå University.”7 At HUMLab, the aim of the conceptual cyberinfrastructure is to facilitate cross-sectional meetings between researchers. To achieve this, the design principles stress attributes such as translucence (the possibility to see and be seen), flexibility (in terms of use and movement), and nonlinearity (of space). Finally, the implementation of these ideas is contingent on the actual possibilities of the space to be rearranged and customized according to the first two levels of more abstract needs and wants. In short, Svensson has recognized that, although the discourse of research infrastructure is sometimes too abstract or, conversely, too grounded in pure materiality, “most infrastructures are highly situated in . . . particular context(s),” and so are conditioned by a variety of concrete and material factors that can exceed the initial plans.8 Such a model serves as inspiration and point of departure from which I propose the concept of expanded infrastructure throughout this essay.

The articulation of an expanded conception of infrastructure is important for analyzing, understanding, and indeed challenging how infrastructure and digital/cyberinfrastructure, associated with the industrial and the knowledge economies, respectively, are defined and debated with regard to the production and dissemination of knowledge. Moreover, many such definitions and debates have tended to stress the material foundations of infrastructure, so that in the early 2000s, for example, cyberinfrastructure was understood to consist of “large-scale facilities for the storage, sharing and algorithmic analysis of massive digital datasets.”9 However, in the humanities in particular we need not only to develop the facilities and tools but also to translate traditional humanistic content into digital formats capable of being analyzed via algorithmic methodologies. This is of particular importance in an environment in which the digital can take on the role of a regulatory technology through which researchers, policy makers, and funding bodies renegotiate their position in the knowledge production circuit.10 Therefore, I propose the notion of an expanded infrastructure so that we in the digital humanities question not only the idea of infrastructure as mere materiality but also the we, the what, and the when that are implied in the exchanges of knowledge and goods. Finally, an expanded conception of infrastructure allows the growing digital humanities communities, as well as the communities that produce, store, and research digital knowledge with social and humanistic goals in mind, to reimagine and reconsider diverse forms of knowledge, funding formulas, and models as centered on complex human interactions that sustain digital projects along with other sociocultural initiatives.

Digital Humanities Resources in Small Colleges and Service-Oriented Universities

As Bryan Alexander and Rebecca Frost Davis have noted, small colleges, universities, and service-oriented institutions “take advantage of existing structures and networks to implement digital humanities initiatives more concerned with teaching/learning.”11 In the larger field of the digital humanities, smaller institutions have modest resources, and yet they have been able to develop initiatives in which the “humane digital,” understood by Burke as “the human element and . . . the intersubjective judgement,” continues to be central.12 This recycling and reuse of existing institutional resources and human interconnections, with concrete beneficiary communities in mind, is a good example of what I call an expanded infrastructure. This is also very much in line with what scholars such as Johanna Drucker have suggested when they have posited that the digital humanities needs to consider more closely its humanistic aspect and, more radically, human connections.13 In the case of service-oriented universities, the connections with communities and constituencies they serve and from whom they learn, in a type of reciprocal ethnographic model of knowledge construction, become assets that help us rethink the way digital humanities can or should be understood.

Morever, small service-oriented institutions operate in the current environment in which research (usually associated with expensive tools and labs) is overvalued at the expense of teaching. Critics such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley, among others, have clearly underscored the sinking of the academic ship centered around neoliberal logics that decenter the human component from the humanities in favor of digital utopianisms that leave ethnic communities and small educational institutions alike at the margin of how digital technologies are created and theorized.14 On the other hand, initiatives at small and community colleges such as La Guardia, Central College, and Lane Community College, among others, or in virtual spaces such as hybrid pedagogy and critical digital pedagogy are examples showing that creative digital humanities practices are already established in many places.15 As a concrete example, I present in summary the initial steps that are being taken to advance the digital humanities at the University of Indianapolis. In essence, these steps are an exercise in assessing what the infrastructural needs of the university are, which shows that an expanded notion of infrastructure is at the core of the institution’s mandate.

The University of Indianapolis is a service-oriented institution of higher education whose motto, “Education for service,” is in effect a succinct summary of the pedagogical practices, educational philosophies, and academic actions and projects at the institution. The university develops a large part of its academic endeavors and activities through service-learning programs at the local, national, and international levels, which allow students to experience at first hand what they learn in the classroom. Additionally, the institution relies on a general-education curriculum that prepares students for logical and critical thinking through writing, reading, speaking, and listening. By serving the communities, students build knowledge not only about or from but also with the communities they serve. These connections in turn become, through a process of adaptation and interconnection, parts of an expanded infrastructure in which material objects and digital tools are only part of the equation.

Although the university does not have a program that is institutionally named digital humanities or is particularly devoted to this field, it is possible to identify what the ECAR working group has termed an “early stage” implementation of digital humanities.16 In that sense, elements already in place such as the Faculty Design Studio, a space created to “organize learning communities and support the daily practice of faculty at all ranks to excel as teachers, scholars and mentors,”17 and the groups that have resulted from such endeavor, Faculty Learning Communities, have played a central role in doing digital humanities.

The Faculty Design Studio and the groups that consequently formed did not focus on the study of a particular topic; however, one group devoted its efforts to the exploration of digital humanities and their implementation in a service-oriented institution. Formed by members with a diverse range of knowledge about the field, this particular group started to reflect on what infrastructure would be needed and what infrastructural elements were already accessible to them and to other members of the institution.

The group understood what Gregory Crane, Brent Seals, and Melissa Terras pointed out in 2009: “the center of gravity for intellectual life in every society is now digital,” meaning that digital tools and sophisticated repositories already in existence are central to the development of any cultural and intellectual action.18 Furthermore, the group came to the conclusion that human beings and their complex interactions are the core of such cultural and intellectual actions, consequently changing the perspective from which infrastructure might be seen.

With this idea that infrastructure encompasses material structures, people, expertise, and methodologies, the Faculty Learning Community reached out to librarians already working with digital collections and to faculty members from departments such as computer sciences, arts, English, modern languages, and history who were pursuing small projects that involved digital analysis, criticism, or some other approach to the digital world. The group began singling out existing projects within the university that could be used to leverage productive connections between digital scholarship and service learning. One of the most important examples of this is the mayoral archives project, which was initiated in 2011 under the direction of Professor Edward Frantz from the department of history and political science.19 Another is a project to document and register oral histories and traditions of the Indianapolis Latino community by reusing and adapting existing social connections and interactions with the surrounding community.20 These and other projects will be fundamental for the implementation of digital humanities and particularly for understanding that infrastructure involves a constant process of interconnection to what already exists in a community in a particular time and place. Respecting community ties is therefore as important for a robust infrastructure as acquiring gadgets and objects that can endure and remain useful only with the support of these communities. This way of thinking is important, and even critical, in places where access to technology and educational institutions is scarce or nonexistent, as made clear in the two case studies that follow.

Proyecto Afrolatin@ and C.N.O.A.

In 2013 the University of Guelph organized a conference devoted to the study of Afro-Hispanic culture. Although the topic of the conference was not related to the debates about digital culture or digital humanities, the way that the conference was conceived and carried out was completely in line with them: it was a virtual conference that gathered people from the Americas, Africa, and Europe. During the synchronous and asynchronous sessions, the attendees discussed diverse topics, most of them related to the way African and Afro-descendant cultures were being represented by art, literature, and other means. In one of the sessions, however, the discussion ended up focusing on the possible uses of existing digital tools and platforms to foster development in African and African-descendant cultures. One of the participants took a radical stand by questioning the benefits of the digital age with respect to the images of Africa and the dissemination of its cultures. This person argued that the problem with such tools was that they were no different from the tractor or other technologies from the industrial era, in that Africa and its descendants have always been presented with tools that promise to solve their issues and put them in a better position. The real issues faced by countries in Africa and other locations around the world were, the speaker continued, basic infrastructure fundamental to the adoption of digital or any other technologies: electrical power, water, education, and land, among others. Although the conference was completely virtual and based on the power of digital tools, his argument was valid and anchored in a tradition of resistance and decolonial thought that challenges a hierarchy of values based on epistemic presuppositions originating in the West.

What could be termed colonial narratives, or narratives of victimization, have been used to represent Africa and its descendants worldwide as humans playing catch-up with other continents, peoples, and social organizations. However, such narratives of dependency have been challenged by ethnic and social communities on how they interact with technologies and, in the process, reevaluate conceptions of infrastructure. For example, Anna Everett and Alondra Nelson have shown how African, African-descendant, and other racialized communities have produced, transformed, appropriated, and consumed technologies, particularly digital tools.21 This is evident in the adoption of technologies by Afro-descendant musical communities to produce rhythms such as hip-hop and house music, which establish new forms of communication action by using readily available digital objects. The same is true for other activist endeavors, such as the virtual barrio or the Chicano internet, as well as the indigenous Zapatista revolution, which showed the power of social, cultural, and activist infrastructures when combined with those that use digital tools.22

An interesting case in which racial and ethnic communities created alternative practices and expanded digital infrastructures is that of Proyecto Afrolatin@ (here called Proyecto), which emerged as an initiative interested in exploring and recovering Afro-descendant experiences in the Americas. Although initially created as a traditional social sciences and humanities venture to explore and uncover hidden relations between African Americans and Afro-Latinos, in 2012 it was relaunched with the idea of “using web-based and mobile technologies to facilitate development of digital citizenship for Afro-descendant communities and social movements.”23 The project, formerly affiliated with universities and institutions of higher education, became an independent initiative with limited access to funding and material resources, which made it difficult for Proyecto to achieve their cultural preservation and social action objectives. However, like the Zapatistas, Proyecto solved that gap by taking advantage of existing structures, networks, and technologies already being used by the communities with which they were working. This led Proyecto’s directors to rethink the infrastructure for their digital endeavors strategically by conceiving of it not only in terms of expensive systems and computers (which were out of their reach) but also in terms of existing social connections developed through basic analog media (such as personal narratives and treating traditional narratives as artifacts) and electronic devices such as smartphones. Infrastructure, in this case, was used in helping reconnect Afro-Latinos throughout the Americas as diverse complex communities with political power in the region. Likewise, through interacting with censuses and other tools for civic engagement, these communities became aware of their roles and possibilities as citizens at a time when they can combine the power of the digital with their traditional analog systems of representation, communication, and political and cultural engagement. In this case, the infrastructure for digital projects among Afro-Latin American populations in the Americas was the result of a productive connection between a particular community’s assets (their local knowledge) and existing digital platforms.

What Proyecto demonstrated is that when combined with digital tools, the complex connection between Afro-descendant people, cultural objects (such as narratives, rites, traditions, and writings), histories, and forms of expression became a productive and expanded way to understand infrastructure. Proyecto collaborators realized that social and cultural connections and strategies have been in existence for generations and have been in continuous use by communities to create, store, transmit, and disseminate, through networks of diasporic communication, their lived experiences as Afro-Latinos.24 The incorporation of digital tools based on open-source platforms and easily accessible electronic devices (e.g., Google platform, Facebook, basic blogs, and voice recording tools) was made possible because of the existence of these other interconnections (historic, symbolic, and cultural infrastructures to transmit information from member to member) that conditioned the way that digital tools were adopted. In other words, Proyecto took advantage of the historical connections between people and the dynamics of cultural information and how it was disseminated to create its own conception of infrastructure. For instance, although Proyecto created an open-source digital voice recorder that community members could use as both a desktop and a mobile application, such a digital tool would be useless without preexisting connections (family, racial, ethnic, etc.) with subjects who were bearers of knowledge (usually elders). Community members would in turn need a connector (a person helping to connect knowledge and collect it via digital gadgets) who would become a fundamental part of the expanded infrastructure created by Proyecto.

Moreover, with this expanded infrastructure in place, Proyecto gathered information, histories, and accounts from Afro-Latin American communities in Colombia, Panama, the United States, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, and other places. The gathering process involved a decentralized network of participants, each of whom used her or his own device to record that participant’s own account and those of others, and the curation and archiving was centralized and managed by the Proyecto’s staff, who were part-time collaborators and volunteers.

Like Proyecto, C.N.O.A. (abbreviation of Conferencia Nacional de Organizaciones Afrocolombianas, the Spanish title of the National Assembly of Afro-descendant Organizations), a Colombian network of regional social movements devoted to working with Afro-Colombian communities, uses previously existing human and epistemological objects and interactions to create digital projects focused on social justice. C.N.O.A.’s main goals are connected to safeguarding the human rights and the interests of Afro-descendant communities, and the organization has turned to the use of digital tools as a way to store memories, educate, and reach wider communities. C.N.O.A. does most of its work in rural areas, where access to digital tools and the expertise to use them are low. To overcome the challenges that this situation poses, the organization has adopted a methodology based on extensive collaboration and sharing of knowledge. In practice, when C.N.O.A. approaches a given community in which the elders and other members do not know how to use or access the digital tools necessary to record information, the organization relies on the more experienced users in the community who do have the access and know-how.

Facing the limitations of access and expertise, C.N.O.A. created material analog devices such as a caja de herramientas (toolbox) to educate Afro-Colombians about their rights and on how to defend them. The toolbox consists of a cardboard box with materials inside, including a CD with information regarding rights of Afro-Colombian communities, as well as possibilities of connection and interconnection through the use of digital tools. The toolbox is very useful in rural contexts where there is no internet coverage but where the communities have access to electricity and a computer. Even in regions without electricity or computers, the toolbox is another way to create connections and share knowledge thanks to the written and graphical information it contains. This toolbox is also a useful aid on how to participate in the digital realm in order to educate, showcase knowledge and culture, achieve concrete goals related to human rights and to issues of discrimination, and enhance the visibility of Afro-descendants as political actors at both the national and international levels. In short, like Proyecto, C.N.O.A. used existing digital tools (in this case the Google and WordPress platforms, Twitter, phones, and mobile applications), preexisting community connections, knowledge transmitted from generation to generation, and the support of diverse people to create a complex but effective expanded infrastructure to carry out digital projects and initiatives.

The important implication of both these projects is that they have created practices and methodologies that challenge and make us rethink how infrastructure has been conceptualized in the digital humanities and other related fields that use digital technologies. One of the most interesting features of both projects is the use of existing elements such as networks and community protocols to achieve their goals. On the one hand, the advantage of digital tools is that they have provided powerful means to increase the visibility of Afro-descendant peoples in many social and national settings in which the invisibility of African heritage has been the norm. Some of these people can even claim their status as citizens—something that is not granted in some parts of the world, including developed nations. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that many of these Afro-descendant communities and networks in the Americas have existed for more than five hundred years. In that sense, the expanded vision of infrastructure constructed by Proyecto and C.N.O.A. taps into preexisting processes and relations, and so it is, itself, most usefully understood as a process that uses and reuses existing sociocultural and technological structures in order to construct more open and diverse conceptions of humanity.

It is also interesting to note that these projects were funded by agencies that are not usually connected to the field of digital humanities: The Ford Foundation (Proyecto) and USAID (C.N.O.A.). Although these are big foundations that generally fund large projects, that was not the case for the examples studied here. The projects emerged from grants dedicated to programs of economic development in general, particularly those tied to ethnic and racial groups seen as poor and therefore underdeveloped. It was the communities, however, who decided to add a digital component as a way for them to achieve their goals and reach wider communities, making visible part of the “unseen labor behind our digital infrastructures.”25 In that sense, an expanded infrastructure also shows how agencies and practitioners who are not so predominant in the field can contribute to a global economic development in which the digital humanities is both a contributor and a beneficiary.

As I have stated at the beginning of this work, it is undeniable that the digital humanities have been expanding globally and coming into contact with diverse and very different contextual realities. In that landscape, as evidenced by the University of Indianapolis, Proyecto, and C.N.O.A., there is a need for an expanded notion of infrastructure, especially if we do not want the human of the digital humanities to be displaced by material, technocratic visions that leave human beings (complex, diverse, and different) at the margins of existence. Moreover, an expanded notion of infrastructure that includes processes and cultural interconnections in which existing structures (physical, symbolic, etc.), people, values, and knowledge play a fundamental role will also allow us to pursue a form of digital humanities that can contribute to social and human justice.

Notes

1. Klein and Gold, in the introductory piece to Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, resort to the concept of “Expanded field” in order to better explain the relational, interconnected, contextual, and malleable nature of the field. See Klein and Gold, “Digital Humanities.”

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2. Mattern, “Library as Infrastructure.”

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3. Edmond, “Collaboration and Infrastructure”; Star and Ruhleder, “Steps.”

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4. Edmond, “Collaboration and Infrastructure,” 59.

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5. Crane, Seales, and Terras, “Cyberinfrastructure.”

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6. Svensson, “Cyberinfrastructure,” 74.

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7. Svensson, “Cyberinfrastructure,” 45.

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8. Svensson, “Cyberinfrastructure,” 44.

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9. Kaltenbrunner, “Digital Infrastructure,” 275.

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10. Kaltenbrunner, “Digital Infrastructure,” 276.

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11. Alexander and Davis, “Should Liberal Arts?,” 375.

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12. Burke, “The Humane Digital.”

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13. Drucker, “Humanistic Theory,” 96.

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14. Chun et al., “The Dark Side.”

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15. McGrail et al., “Community College.”

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16. ECAR, Building Capacity.

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17. University of Indianapolis, “Faculty Development.”

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18. Crane, Seales, and Terras, “Cyberinfrastructure,” 27.

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19. Institute for Civic Leadership, Digital Mayoral Archives.

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20. Mattern, “Library as Infrastructure.”

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21. Everett, Digital Diasporas; and Nelson and Tu, Technicolor.

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22. Cleaver, “The Zapatista Effect.”

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23. Proyecto Afrolatin@, “About Us.”

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24. Wade, “Rethinking Mestizaje.”

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25. Eghbal, Roads and Bridges.

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