Alan Liu

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities focuses centrally on the stake that the digital humanities have taken in current critical infrastructure studies. It brings the infrastructural approach into the spotlight as an area where DH is uniquely equipped to lead the humanities. The book’s goal is to explore how DH can influence thought and practice in the general arena of infrastructural studies; and, reciprocally, how infrastructural approaches in that broader arena can influence DH. In doing so, the book brings forward for attention to a broad scholarly audience the current state of infrastructure studies as “critical” (and as an intervention in the nature of critique itself). Global, social, and disciplinary diversity are overarching emphases. Chapters discuss the global dimensions of infrastructure (e.g., in relation to the environment and logistics systems) and focus on varied world regions and nations; social concerns related to decolonization, Indigenous peoples, underrepresented (and under-networked) communities, feminism, multilingualism, and labor justice; and a wide variety of disciplines or fields bearing on DH, including  book studies, East and South Asian studies, environmental studies, feminist studies, Indigenous studies, information science, labor studies, library studies, media studies, platform studies, postcolonial studies, history of technology, and science-technology studies. To complement the historical, theoretical, and critical work of most of the chapters, a final section of the book includes briefer speculative, creative, or playful chapters offering position statements, what-if scenarios or plans, and multimodal arguments that imagine, and in some cases enact, on brio how DH infrastructures could be different and better. An innovative feature of the book is its set of “infrastructure manifests” declaring the infrastructure that its editors’ and authors’ used for making their chapters or projects.

Against the backdrop of such digital infrastructural studies, Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities depicts DH both as a continuance of legacy infrastructure studies and as part of the renewal of that legacy in critical infrastructure studies.

Continuance is an important emphasis in this book because infrastructural thought and practice were central to DH from the first. Under its original name of humanities computing, DH was infrastructure studies avant la lettre. This was true even if at the time—for example, soon after the start of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in 1987 or of the first annual joint conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing & Association for Computers and the Humanities (ALLC-ACH) in 198937—there were few known connections in either direction between the humanities computing scholarly community and the STS circle that explicitly thematized the study of infrastructure. It was true because of DH’s long-standing hands-on thinking, as it might be called, about corpus construction, text-encoding and metadata standards, text-analysis tools, minimal computing, maker or builder studies, media archaeology, and the creation of DH labs, centers, and programs. The photo of a hard drive’s damaged, naked platter on the cover of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s influential media-archaeological book Mechanisms (2007) is perhaps perfectly emblematic of DH’s interest in infrastructure. So is the recent surge of writings about DH labs, which directly acknowledges the originating infrastructuralism of STS with its studies of labs, medical facilities, and other research environments.

But the renewal of infrastructuralism is just as important an emphasis in this book. DH is an important contributor to the current evolution of infrastructure studies as critical infrastructure studies. Ironically, this is the case despite the fact that DH was first seen as critically naive in comparison to its sibling field, “new media studies.” “Where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?” it was asked. Typically, after all, new media studies faced outward from its base in academe to criticize digital society at large, critiquing digital and media technical infrastructures as the means toward that end. Exemplary are such branches of new media studies as social-media platform studies (e.g., Helmond, Nieborg, and van der Vlist; Lovink) and media infrastructure studies (e.g., Parks and Starosielski), where incisive infrastructural critique aimed ultimately to critique digital society’s overlords (e.g., Facebook or Google). By contrast, DH seemed at first not to have developed ways to merge its critique of academic technologies with cultural critique.40 DH appeared to be academically introverted, focusing on such scholarly infrastructural technical problems previously mentioned as corpus construction, text-encoding and metadata standards, text-analysis tools, and creating labs and centers.

Yet the critical potential of DH was definitely there, charging up in the academy as if in a battery. If DH focused on technologies of digital scholarship, that also meant that it could critique and change those technologies (and the academic practices that they reflected) in a hands-on way that new media studies in its early phases, commenting at a hands-off distance from the Silicon Valley empires and other regimes that it observed in fascinated horror, typically could not. From the beginning, for example, DH’s critical potential was evident in the passionate commitment of many digital humanists to developing scholarly platforms for collaboration and open access that circumvented, or simply ignored, the offerings of both the overlord FANG companies (an acronym originally encompassing Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google; since expanded to include firms like Apple) and the so-called EdTech industry.