The Beast in Progress

This post probably won't make much sense without a decent background in infrastructure studies, or a passing (at least) familiarity with the idea of cyberinfrastructure. I'm not going to provide those here. They'll be discussed ad nauseum in future posts. This really is simply a first place to put down where I am now with the dissertation outline.

Here it is in all of its amorphous, unpolished glory.

1. Can we "build" cyberinfrastructure?
   What is the nature of cyberinfrastructure and its essential attributes such that it comes into existence
   
   1. Claim that it is in existence (which requires some form of existence proof).
   
   
   2. Stories about how it happened (which is largely addressed in part III)
      • My job is to tell the story vs. a story (constructing something authoritative).
      
      
      • My contribution is to bring discipline to a topic that is still developing, a story in medias res.



2. Addressing the OEP (Ontological, Epistempological, Phenomenological) Problematic of Infrastructure Studies
   When we speak of infrastructure, we have taken the product of historical forces, path dependencies, and heterogeneous processes that have sunk below the level of individual and sociocultural cognition, and resurrected it as a bounded object for our deconstruction. This is not without its own consequences or problems. What makes examination difficult is managing the complex choreography of OEP. This process has been captured in different forms and in different disciplines over time.
   
   
   
   • The story of Plato's cave - only seeing shadows on the wall, but needing to understand the object that casts them.
     
   • Aristotle's Categories - an early and foundational taxonomy to provide structure, a tool to attempt choreography.
     
   • Formal metaphors rising out of mathematics.
     
     
     • Orthographic projections - understanding the surface (static) features of a multidimensional object by projecting it into lower planes.
     
     
     • The Divergence Theorem in vector calculus - reconstructing an object (the volume and dynamic features) by decomposing integrated volume into a function of surface features.
   
   
   • Husserl's examination of meaning and object, and the presentation of cyberinfrastructure as a "situation of affairs".
   
   
   • Heidegger's treatment of being-in-the-world, and the consequences of understanding things as present-at-hand (the focused and prescient object of examination) vs. ready-to-hand (functional, operational, and transparent).
   
   
   • Bowker, Star, and Ruhleder's framework of "infrastructural inversion", which aims to make the transparent visible.
   
   
   • Latour's Actor-Network Theory, which generates a robust qualitative description of infrastructures, but often falls short in practice of capturing both the nature of the object and the complexity of relationships and processes it contains.
   
   
   
   Each of these approaches (and doubtless there are others), in my interpretation, is related to management the OEP choreography and acknowledges the underlying problematic of describing objects of complexity (and yes, I am drawing the distinction between complex, and merely complicated). How do we draw upon or integrate these previous interpretive frameworks to develop a new understanding of infrastructure/cyberinfrastructure?


3. Historical case study - NSFNET to Cyberinfrastructure
   
   The current state of cyberinfrastructure can be built out of a story that has been told a number of times, and in a number of ways - the rise of the Internet. With rare exception, these stories concentrate on the commercialization and privatization of the Internet, and ignore the continuation of the technology as a platform for scientific and technological research. Some of this history can be inferred from studies in collaboratories and CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), but has rarely been approached from historical, STS, or complex systems perspectives. I am pursuing access to interview most of the available key players in the rise of the Internet from the ARPANET and NSFNET eras, through to the present instantiation through the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure. I plan to use these interviews, as well as analyze relevant archives and documents, to understand the following:
   
   
   
   • How did political forces shape the sociotechnical topology of cyberinfrastructure?
   
   
   • What are the consequences of this sociotechnical configuration for different research disciplines and their continued legitimacy within the cyberinfrastructure research framework, and further, their standing among the sciences as a whole?
   
   
   • How can organizations approach crafting policy to ensure the protection and benefit of ALL research sectors within the cyberinfrastructure-based enterprise?