Infrastructural Inversion as a Generative Resource in Digital Scholarship

Abstract

Digital humanities scholarship has regularly challenged characteristic organizational features of academic life in the humanities. For example, it is typically practiced in larger collaborative projects that produce output very different from the traditional scholarly monograph. Digital humanists often present their work in strikingly reflexive accounts that are reminiscent of what science and technology studies scholars have called infrastructural inversion, a method that defamiliarizes the socio-material infrastructure of research to expose the inner workings of knowledge production. At first sight, infrastructural inversion might seem to constitute the opposite of the older concept of articulation work, which designates the situated activity of coordinating and managing cooperative work processes. It is more useful, however, to think about infrastructural inversion as a specific form of articulation work. The inversions performed by digital scholars serve to highlight and problematize established ways of streamlining articulation work, for example, through the established model of peer review, or by using conventional forms of scholarly output. In turn, such systematic defamiliarization opens up new and potentially competing ways of imagining the organization of articulation work.

Key Words:

• articulation work
• digital humanities
• infrastructural inversion

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Paul Wouters, Kean Birch, Les Levidow and two anonymous referees for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper.