Upturning Infrastructure: Obfuscation, Invisibility, and the Material Contours of Knowledge Infrastructures

• In Event: The Invisible Aspects of Digital Infrastructure

Abstract

In 2003, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) convened issued a report on cyberinfrastructure, known as the “Atkins report.” Since that time, the term has been taken up in various scholarly circles and the concept has evolved, including, for example, the NSF workshop “History & Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures” led by Edwards and Bowker (2007) and another NSF workshop led in 2012 again in part by Edwards and Bowker entitled “Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and Research Challenges” (2013). Of course, these reports build upon and extend on the body of infrastructure studies.

Steven J. Jackson defines "infrastructure" as the "social and material forms foundational to other kinds of human action," but clearly the concept of "infrastructure", understood both literally and as a metaphor, implies more than that. We wish to discuss and highlight some of the contributions of infrastructure studies to our understanding of information. We are particularly interested in the notion of invisibility--how the notion of infrastructure obscures or reveals important aspects of documentary and other forms of information work, and how it erases the most essential contributions of information workers.

Librarianship and other information professions have always been understood as a form of social interaction, between and amongst people and documents. The notion of infrastructure adds “materiality” to our conceptualization, a process already underway through the adoption and focusing of the term “information.” Notions of knowledge infrastructure hasn’t highlighted the social, it has diminished it through dilution.

Authors

• Robert Montoya, University of California, Los Angeles

• Gregory Leazer, UCLA Dept of Information Studies