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For many centuries, the principle of linear planning based on a grid pattern has played a significant role in the spatial organization of urban boundaries. Additionally, the grid principle has formed the basis for policies and practices related to the emergence of “disciplinary societies”, leading to the modern networked society. Drawing on the concept of the grid as a cultural technique by media philosopher Bernhard Siegert, this article examines the functioning of the grid as epistemic frameworks and the media of representation, order, and filteration. The article also provides insights into the manifestation of the grid principle in the context of the emerging field of social research on infrastructures, including the digital infrastructure of smart cities. This encompasses a wide spectrum, from smart devices and everyday communication to pervasive sensors and big data, from the sharing of images and impressions to advanced prosthetics, from the development of smart cities to the deployment of surveillance technologies and predictive algorithms. Through a range of case studies, from the study of structured territorial control of the Roman limitatio to the efficient grid patterns of pre-fabricated housing districts worldwide, the research examines the potential and transhistorical nature of the grid principle. The article is intended for media philosophers, anthropologists, urbanists and digital culture theorists.

From documenting human rights abuses to studying online advertising, web archives are increasingly positioned as critical resources for a broad range of scholarly Internet research agendas. In this article, we reflect on the motivations and methodological challenges of investigating the world's largest web archive, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (IAWM). Using a mixed methods approach, we report on a pilot project centred around documenting the inner workings of 'Save Page Now' (SPN) – an Internet Archive tool that allows users to initiate the creation and storage of 'snapshots' of web resources. By improving our understanding of SPN and its role in shaping the IAWM, this work examines how the public tool is being used to 'save the Web' and highlights the challenges of operationalising a study of the dynamic sociotechnical processes supporting this knowledge infrastructure. Inspired by existing Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches, the paper charts our development of methodological interventions to support an interdisciplinary investigation of SPN, including: ethnographic methods, 'experimental blackbox tactics', data tracing, modelling and documentary research. We discuss the opportunities and limitations of our methodology when interfacing with issues associated with temporality, scale and visibility, as well as critically engage with our own positionality in the research process (in terms of expertise and access). We conclude with reflections on the implications of digital STS approaches for 'knowing infrastructure', where the use of these infrastructures is unavoidably intertwined with our ability to study the situated and material arrangements of their creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web archives collections have become important sources for Internet scholars by documenting the past versions of web resources. Understanding how these collections are created and curated is of increasing concern and recent web archives scholarship has studied how the artefacts stored in archives represent specific curatorial choices and collecting practices. This paper takes a novel approach in studying web archiving practice, by focusing on the challenges encountered in archival web crawling and what they reveal about the web itself. Inspired by foundational work in infrastructure studies, infrastructural inversion is applied to study how crawler interactions surface otherwise invisible, background or taken-for-granted aspects of the web. This framework is applied to study three examples selected from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork observations of web archiving practices at the Danish Royal Library, with findings demonstrating how the challenges of archival crawling illuminate the web's varied actors, as well as their changing relationships, power differentials and politics. Ultimately, analysis through infrastructural inversion reveals how collection via crawling positions archives as active participants in web infrastructure, both shaping and shaped by the needs and motivations of other web actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign imaginaries of surveillance and informatization in China are commonly connected to notions of omnipresence, advanced technology, and coherent governance. In reality, however, the Chinese government's efforts at the building of a digital society are permeated by confusion over the meaning of central edicts, interdepartmental and regional fragmentation, and overlap between different digital governance systems. This article interrogates the connection between two emerging governance infrastructures embedded in the Chinese Party-state's latest informatization drive, the "National Civilized Cities Award" (NCCA) and the "Social Credit System Project" (SCSP) through a mixed methods approach. It combines data from an analysis of a recent NCCA assessment system government work manual, project websites, and findings from thirty qualitative video interviews with residents from twenty different cities in China to demonstrate that overlap between these projects is clear in terms of 1) criteria and indices measuring project development; 2) promoted virtues and individual behaviors; and 3) data sharing between systems. Local governments charged with the design and implementation of these initiatives frequently conflate their targets and objectives, prompting occasional reprimand from higher-level authorities. Public confusion about the meaning and purpose of both the NCCA and SCSP has meanwhile accompanied haphazard system development, demonstrating that the path towards a "digital society" in China is fraught and far from uncontested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, corporate branding has trended strongly towards environmental conscientiousness and green rhetoric, often heralded under the term "sustainability" – a broad and mutable rhetorical strategy that not only serves industry self-interest but is mobilized by civil society actors as well. This tension is especially apparent in the information communication technologies (ICT) sector. Employing Wittgenstein's concept of the language-game, this article describes how sustainability has been deployed by tech companies, and how these efforts have also been contested – and strategically mobilized – by activist environmental non-profits and critical scholars seeking to reform tech sector practices. Combining environmental communication, political economy, and discourse analysis, we investigate the conceptualization and communication of sustainability as a discourse within and against the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds.

Drawing on empirical research, this article explores the possible sociopolitical effects of database infrastructures on the shaping and construction of human rights narratives. While it has become commonplace to theorise human rights through the lens of narrative, academic debates have largely ignored the technical infrastructures through which human rights narratives are constructed. The article responds to this gap by deploying and developing theoretical tools from software and infrastructure studies to consider database infrastructures as complex sociotechnical devices that engender sociopolitical consequences for narrative possibilities. Focusing on two key examples drawn from the empirical research, the article demonstrates the necessity of developing a critical attentiveness to the ways that human rights narratives are shaped by digital infrastructure. In doing so, the article develops and complicates infrastructure and software studies approaches whilst also demonstrating their value for other fields of research which do not ordinarily come within their purview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the significance of schools' data infrastructures as a site of institutional power and (re)configuration. Using 'infrastructure studies' as a theoretical framework and drawing on in-depth studies of three contrasting Australian secondary schools, the paper takes a holistic look at schools' data infrastructures. In contrast to the notion of the 'platformatised' school, the paper details the ad hoc and compromised ways that these school data infrastructures have developed – highlighting a number of underlying sociotechnical conditions that lead to an ongoing process of data infrastructuring. These include issues of limited technical interoperability and differences between educational requirements and commercially-led designs. Also apparent is the disjuncture between the imagined benefits of institutional data use and the ongoing maintenance and repair required to make the infrastructures function. Taking an institutional perspective, the paper explores why digital technologies continue to complicate (rather than simplify) school processes and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the organisation of collaborative digital methods and data projects in the context of engaged research-led teaching in the humanities. Drawing on interviews, field notes, projects and practices from across eight research groups associated with the Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org), it provides considerations for those interested in undertaking such projects, organised around four areas: composing (1) problems and questions; (2) collectives of inquiry; (3) learning devices and infrastructures; and (4) vernacular, boundary and experimental outputs. Informed by constructivist approaches to learning and pragmatist approaches to collective inquiry, these considerations aim to support teaching and learning through digital projects which surface and reflect on the questions, problems, formats, data, methods, materials and means through which they are produced.

The past decade has seen the rise of “data portals” as online devices for making data public. They have been accorded a prominent status in political speeches, policy documents, and official communications as sites of innovation, transparency, accountability, and participation. Drawing on research on data portals around the world, data portal software, and associated infrastructures, this paper explores three approaches for studying the social life of data portals as technopolitical devices: (a) interface analysis, (b) software analysis, and (c) metadata analysis. These three approaches contribute to the study of the social lives of data portals as dynamic, heterogeneous, and contested sites of public sector datafication. They are intended to contribute to critically assessing how participation around public sector datafication is invited and organized with portals, as well as to rethinking and recomposing them.

One could think that bibliometric measurement of academic performance has always been digital since the computer-assisted invention of the Science Citation Index. Yet, since the 2000s, the digitization of bibliometric infrastructure has accelerated at a rapid pace. Citation databases are indexing an increasing variety of publication types. Altmetric data aggregators are producing data on the reception of research outcomes. Machine-readable persistent identifiers are created to unambiguously identify researchers, research organizations, and research objects; and evaluative software tools and current research information systems are constantly enlarging their functionalities to make use of these data and extract meaning from them. In this article, we analyse how these developments in evaluative bibliometrics have contributed to an extension of indicator-based research evaluation towards data-driven research analytics. Drawing on empirical material from blogs and websites as well as from research and policy papers, we discuss how interoperability, scalability, and flexibility as material specificities of digital infrastructures generate new ways of data production and their assessment, which affect the possibilities of how academic performance can be understood and (e)valuated.

According to a December 21, 2018, Michigan Attorney General report, at least 105 Michigan State University employees, between 1997 and 2015, had received complaints from women about Dr. Larry Nassar's inappropriate touching during medical treatment. In 2014, one of these complaints was finally reported to MSU's Title IX office, triggering an investigation that led to a report that concluded Dr. Larry Nassar's methods of treatment were "medically appropriate" and cleared him of any wrongdoing. Rhetorical analysis of this report exposes how Nassar benefitted from a rhetorical infrastructure that was designed to offer him institutional protection as an expert in medical techniques that require extensive touching of patients. Such analysis also exposes the specific discursive practices that sustain the rhetorical infrastructures that enable this institutional protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the organisation of collaborative digital methods and data projects in the context of engaged research-led teaching in the humanities. Drawing on interviews, field notes, projects and practices from across eight research groups associated with the Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org), it provides considerations for those interested in undertaking such projects, organised around four areas: composing (1) problems and questions; (2) collectives of inquiry; (3) learning devices and infrastructures; and (4) vernacular, boundary and experimental outputs. Informed by constructivist approaches to learning and pragmatist approaches to collective inquiry, these considerations aim to support teaching and learning through digital projects which surface and reflect on the questions, problems, formats, data, methods, materials and means through which they are produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Social scientific research is catching up to technical work on global desalination. • Political Ecology points to ongoing inequities that a purely technical view of desalination does not address. • Historical, community based, and qualitative research will expand debates on desalting. • Work on financialization and the politics of desalting are especially needed in the future. The piece outlines the contributions of key works in the field of the political ecology of desalination over the past decade. We note that the field is diverse in terms of contributions from geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and public policy scholars. The research to date has been concerned with the ways in which the deployment of desalting techniques can reflect and reinforce social processes of inequality, political power and economic flows. In this way, desalination has been opened up for intellectual debate beyond technical considerations of the desalting industry and engineers. A critical perspective that complements the recent discussions of environmental harm caused by the desalination industry has emerged as well across a number of global and transboundary contexts. A number of themes emerged that will continue to be of interest to scholars and that need to be addressed in the years ahead. First, desalination intersects transboundary water governance and geopolitics between different water uses and emerges from complex assemblages of local and global actors, including financial actors, water companies, governments, technologies, and natural forces. Second, critical scholarship on desalination needs to continue to pay attention to the interests in and overarching patterns of, the Green New Deal and Blue Economy, each of which intersect with the worlds of academia and policymaking, and involve issues of climate adaptation and mitigation. Third, questions about equity remain with desalination as it is a solution deeply imbricated in the unequal distribution of resources, and questions about representation in decision-making remain. Fourth, research on finance and infrastructure have been at the core of critical desalting research and should remain so. Fifth, there is a growing heterogeneity in terms of research in types of desalting, from reverse osmosis to inland desalting to nuclear and more. This variety will make for rich research for the years ahead. Our hope is that the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological flexibility of this area of research will remain a strong point continuing its rigor, as well as the already robust collegiality among scholars in this interesting, and still nascent field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One could think that bibliometric measurement of academic performance has always been digital since the computer-assisted invention of the Science Citation Index. Yet, since the 2000s, the digitization of bibliometric infrastructure has accelerated at a rapid pace. Citation databases are indexing an increasing variety of publication types. Altmetric data aggregators are producing data on the reception of research outcomes. Machine-readable persistent identifiers are created to unambiguously identify researchers, research organizations, and research objects; and evaluative software tools and current research information systems are constantly enlarging their functionalities to make use of these data and extract meaning from them. In this article, we analyse how these developments in evaluative bibliometrics have contributed to an extension of indicator-based research evaluation towards data-driven research analytics. Drawing on empirical material from blogs and websites as well as from research and policy papers, we discuss how interoperability, scalability, and flexibility as material specificities of digital infrastructures generate new ways of data production and their assessment, which affect the possibilities of how academic performance can be understood and (e)valuated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of drug smuggling has often taken an organizational perspective whereby the structures of how smuggling is constituted predominate. Building on a growing body of scholarship addressing the networked complexities of drug smuggling this article considers the importance of distinct infrastructural arrangements. Its primary focus is on the materiality of drug smuggling infrastructures, and how the social, spatial and temporal qualities of these configurations overlap with licit mobility infrastructures, including intersections of visibility/invisibility, stability, and permanence. The core conceptual premise, drawn from Science and Technology Studies, is that drug smuggling mobilities are formed of ephemeral infrastructures that exhibit temporary, short-lived stability and permanence through the subversion of licit infrastructural configurations. Drawing on material from El Dorado Airport, Colombia, the paper examines the everyday artefacts which constitute these ephemeral infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the variety of alternative, local platforms that flourished in Hong Kong during 2019–2020, a tumultuous time which was shaped by the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests and the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the app and platform landscape by tracing the differences between local platforms, platforms made in Hong Kong, and mega platforms, platforms owned by international technology giants such as Google and Facebook. It examines this along two axes: the differences on (1) “platform logics”: what alternative organising logics are possible within this landscape? And on (2) “platform mobilities”: how do local platforms compete and co-exist with global conglomerates?In particular, the paper excavates the disparate logics and mobilities in the array of (a) social media platforms, (b) shopping aggregator/city guide platforms, and (c) ride-hail/delivery platforms that grew in tandem with local socio-political rhythms of life in the city. This includes the differences between a “growth-at-all-cost” logic versus the incentives that encourage tailored services to a very specific user-base. Likewise, the disparities that emerge when extraction of data is not the priority – and instead, when the aim is to retain as little data as possible. Similarly, it gives examples of what platforms could look like when they are not centrally characterised by capital accumulation, value-extraction, and race-to-the-bottom logics.This paper thus highlights the vast range of alternative platform possibilities and argues for the importance to think more critically about what platforms we are platforming, where we look to when we think of innovation, and what we forgo in a landscape starved of options. In putting the range of creative local platforms in dialogue with mega-platforms, this paper joins the larger movement urging for a better space for alternatives to flourish.

This essay suggests that hard-boiled crime fiction in the United States has developed the kind of "deep infrastructural ethic" that John Durham Peters says is present in much modern thought. The essay attempts to illuminate the genre's infrastructural ethic and its corresponding affordance for environmental critique by tracing its expressions through a sample of significant texts in the hard-boiled and noir canons, and by concluding with a sustained reading of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (2015). These readings demonstrate that hard-boiled narratives enable readers to perceive the ways in which extractivist infrastructures are frequently built upon and facilitate the exploitation of both human and environmental resources. Hardboiled texts help readers see capitalism's extractivist infrastructure as a type of material and intellectual entrapment that ultimately undermines the common good and the planetary commons. Further, this essay argues that hard-boiled crime fiction attends to what AbdouMaliq Simone calls "infrastructures of relationality" and thus points a way out of the material and metaphysical entrapments of an extractivist economy's infrastructure. The infrastructures of relationality that emerge in a world in which climate crises have broken down the infrastructures of capitalism provide a platform from which individuals can practice a mode of collective thinking and being that offers an alternative to the alienation upon which extractivism depends. In short, the hard-boiled genre is not only one of the Anthropocene's earliest cultural responders but is also a vital genre for making sense of our contemporary situation in a deeper stage of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In New York City, data documenting complaints made to 311 – the city's municipal 'customer service' agency – are increasingly being analyzed by city agencies, politicians, activists, and residents to make sense of urban quality of life. This article examines the infrastructural and socio-cultural conditions that have shaped public dispositions regarding 311 data's representativeness. It argues that while data-based metrics have become a privileged form of knowing in NYC governance, the databased infrastructural form of 311 inevitably sidelines certain people and problems. As communities throughout NYC have grappled with this tension, many New Yorkers have become increasingly ambivalent about the data's value in reporting urban issues. Data(-)based ambivalence troubles the power imbalances that privilege quantitative ways of knowing over other ways of knowing, prompting communities to reposition data(-)based representations as rhetorical tools instead of objective or unbiased ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a case study of how platforms and predictive infrastructures are emerging in higher education. It examines a Learning Analytics Application Programming Interface (API) from a popular Learning Management System. The API is treated firstly as an artefact based on the computational abstraction of educational principles, and secondly as an empirical entry point to investigate the emergence of a Learning Analytics infrastructure in a large Australian university. Through in-depth ethnographic interviews and the interpretative analysis of software development workflows, the paper describes an API-mediated platformisation process involving a range of actors and systems: computational experts, algorithms, data-savvy administrative staff and large corporate actors inserting themselves through back-ends and various other dependencies. In the conclusion, the article argues that the platformisation of higher education is part of a broader project that mobilises programmability and computation to re-engineer educational institutions in the interest of efficiency and prediction. However, the social-scientific study of this project cannot ignore the practical and compromised dimension where human actors and technical systems interact and, in the process, generate meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Since 1919, the Hudson's Bay Company has sponsored films to document and advertise its trading operations. Films such as Hudson's Bay Company Centenary Celebrations (1919), The Heritage of Adventure (1920), and Leipzig Exhibition footage (1930) offered views of North American landscapes and Hudson's Bay Company trading posts and department stores alongside ethnographic footage of Indigenous Peoples. Analysis: Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hudson's Bay Company Archives and textual film analysis of these "fur films," this article theorizes their production and circulation within settler visual culture. Conclusions and implications: Tracing the films' paths from the Eastern Arctic to Montréal, and from London, England, to Leipzig, Germany, this article demonstrates how these moving pictures participate in the entanglement of settler and infrastructural projects that characterize early twentieth-century Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The virtuality and materiality of the digital have created new opportunities for museums to facilitate modes of collaboration and participation centered on marginal actors who were previously ignored or uninvolved in the construction of the social worlds they inhabit. This article examines the limits and fragility of one such mode of participation: museum documentation work. Drawing on staff interviews at the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin, the article investigates how the daily practices of museum staff shape work-related arrangements that support institutional memory-making. In focusing on the infrastructure qualities hidden away in the museum's back-stage operations, the article reveals the political stakes of repair and directs attention to the relationality of workplace order. The article contends that, while documentation is the backbone of the museum's informational fabric, it is frequently done and figured out by implicated actors, and performed within the entangled back-stage setting of museum work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructures support and shape our social world, but they do so in often invisible ways. In few cases is that truer than with various documents that serve infrastructural functions. This article takes one type of those documents—technical standards—and uses analysis of one specific standard to develop theory related to the infrastructural function of writing. The author specifically analyzes one of the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things—the 126-page Tag Data Standard (TDS)—to show how rethinking writing as infrastructure can be valuable for multiple conversations occurring with writing studies, including research on material rhetoric, research that expands the scope of what should be studied as writing, and research in writing studies that links with emerging fields. The author concludes by developing a model for future research on the infrastructural functions of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apps, websites and networked devices now offer to help consumers produce, access and share health knowledge, precipitating social scientific concern over the consequences of these so-called digital health platforms. This paper makes a novel contribution to this literature, taking up a recent call from Plantin et al. to adopt an infrastructural lens in exploring platforms. It argues, through empirical analysis of digital health platforms of different sizes, ages and nationalities, that this conceptual tool is necessary to surface the work entailed in creating and sustaining digital health platforms. Additionally, we suggest that the social scientific literature on platforms – and initial efforts to explore their infrastructural qualities – frequently focus too strongly on the dominant technology companies. Instead, we emphasise the value of drawing emergent companies' platforms into empirical purview through returning to some of the infrastructures literature that informs Plantin et al. – particularly Susan Leigh Star and colleagues. We demonstrate empirically the importance of looking at standards as part of infrastructure building, and the broader set of interconnections between different actors and materials within an infrastructure. In doing so, we demonstrate the value of an infrastructural lens for understanding the density of interconnections that characterise digital health and propose some orientating questions for further enquiry into the infrastructural qualities of platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine how the social disturbance precipitated by 'fake news' can be viewed as a kind of infrastructural uncanny. We suggest that the threat of problematic and viral junk news can raise existential questions about the routine circulation, engagement and monetisation of content through the Web and social media. Prompted by the unsettling effects associated with the 'fake news' scandal, we propose methodological tactics for exploring (1) the link economy and the ranking of content, (2) the like economy and the metrification of engagement and (3) the tracker economy and the commodification of attention. Rather than focusing on the misleading content of junk news, such tactics surface the infrastructural conditions of their circulation, enabling public interventions and experiments to interrogate, challenge and change their role in reconfiguring relations between different aspects of social, cultural, economic and political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States of America, senior centers and public libraries are ubiquitous social institutions found in virtually every municipality. This article analyses these institutions as community-based information infrastructure in the digital learning practices of older adults. Older adults turn to these institutions to learn technology in retirement. How learning takes place in these spaces is shaped both by the institutions, and by the older adults. Negotiations between institutions and older adults shape digital learning. These negotiations are shaped by societal ageism. This article shows that older adults are not passive participants in technology learning, using services provided for them by others, but instead actively shape both how learning services are proffered and the institutional contexts in which these services exist. By learning to embrace the agency of older adults, these under-funded public institutions could powerfully reconfigure themselves for an information society that is also ageing.

The concept of 'media' can provide an anchor point for developing organizational theories about information and communication technologies, materiality, communication, and organizational change. However, to date, organizational research often takes the meaning of the term media for granted. This article therefore explores various conceptions of media, outlining how such theories can be used for advancing the conception of media in organizational research. Using three ideal-typical branches of conceptions of media, we explore key concerns regarding media in existing literature outside of organizational research. First, the culture and power branch problematizes how cultural practices and power structures are inscribed through media; second, the technology and infrastructure branch emphasizes the inherent 'eigenlogik' of media technology; and third, the process and change branch explores how existing economic and aesthetic conventions in media persist over time. Using organizational media in general and enterprise social media in particular we discuss how each of these three ideal-typical branches offer pathways for organizational research. Specifically we argue for shifting the use of the term media beyond merely describing tools for communication as media theories offer insights for understanding the long-term consequences of materiality and ontological co-constitution within sociomaterial assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet protocol development is a social process, and resulting protocols are shaped by their developers’ politics and values. This article argues that the work of protocol development (and more broadly, infrastructure design) poses barriers to developers’ reflection upon values and politics in protocol design. A participant observation of a team developing internet protocols revealed that difficulties defining the stakeholders in an infrastructure and tensions between local and global viewpoints both complicated values reflection. Further, Internet architects tended to equate a core value of interoperability with values neutrality. The article describes how particular work practices within infrastructure development overcame these challenges by engaging developers in praxis: situated, lived experience of the social nature of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces changes in scientific communication in context of Digital Humanities and its relationship with library science. It draws attention to the problems of building research infrastructures as described in infrastructure theories in information science, Digital Humanities, media and feminist studies, and maintenance theory. Then it presents the research infrastructure of DARIAH and the effort to create its node in the Czech Republic with an overview of selected findings on the situation of research infrastructures at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, which plans to participate actively in building the local node of the DARIAH network. In conclusion, the contribution on the basis of infrastructure theories and the conducted survey describes the role of an information professional in the design, management and provision of services to the scientific community through research infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waves of subaltern, colonial, postcolonial, and critical race studies have posed an undeniable challenge to the normative geopolitical bent of area studies, and yet the same challenges are rarely taken up within media studies. Media studies reach a similar impasse when it comes to dealing with geopolitical forms and functions, stressing the dynamism of media and the passivity, historical immutability, and cultural inertness of regions. This article reconsiders the impasses of both area studies and media studies to propose an alternative approach to the region-platform relation: platformativity. The notion of platformativity is intended to address the infra-individual intra-actions between platform and human, and individual and collective – a kind of performativity via platforms. It considers how media infrastructures operate alongside and through national and regional forms to generate signaletic modes of existence that function as relays between disciplinary, sovereign, and biopolitical formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the transformations in medical prescription work and infrastructures brought by digitalization. Our fieldwork takes place in the context of precision medicine development based on genomics High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) in France, through the Plan France Médecine Génomique (PFMG 2025). The Plan aims at industrializing the production of genomic testing in clinical context at a national scale, particularly in oncology. To ensure the intensified flow of information between hospitals and HTS platforms required, a centralized process has been organized around two sequencing platforms and the introduction of a new e-prescription software (E-PRES). We start by analyzing how the e-prescription software changes the practices of health professionals by imposing new technological and professional standards. We show that, more than a mere prescription tool, this software is also a monitoring tool for the platforms and prescribers' work, and a support tool for the logistical and work organization. Secondly, we question the division of labor among the different professionals involved in the organizational or technical tasks required. We show that the feasibility of this new form of digitalized prescription relies on an important data work performed by "small hands" to select, translate and process a vast amount of heterogeneous data., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Froger-Lefebvre, Lade, Vallier and Bourgain.)

While many governments are now committed to release Open Government Data under non-proprietary standardized formats, less attention has been given to the actual consequences of these standards for knowledge workers. Unpacking the history of three open data standards (CSV, GTFS, IATI), this paper shows what is actually happening when these standards are enacted in the work practices of bureaucracies. It is built on participant-observer enquiry and interviews focussed on the back rooms of open data, and looking specifically at the invisible work necessary to construct open datasets. It shows that the adoption of open standards is increasingly becoming an indicator of the advancement of open data programmes. Enacting open standards involves much more than simple technical operations, it operates a quiet and localised transformation of bureaucracies, in which the decisions of data workers have substantive consequences for how the open government data and transparency agendas are performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging area of inquiry in Internet governance scholarship is the role of private information intermediaries in enacting governance via technical design choices and user policies. Following this trajectory, this paper addresses governance by social media rather than governance of social media. Informed by conceptual frameworks from Internet governance and Science and Technology Studies, it examines the extent to which these platforms either promote or constrain rights in three thematic areas: (1) anonymous speech and individual privacy; (2) the ability to express ideas or, stated as a negative liberty, freedom from censorship; and (3) technical affordances of interoperability and permissionless innovation. Because of their unique role as the intermediaries providing citizens with access to the digital public sphere, social media platforms are central points of control on the Internet. Viewing these private platforms through an Internet governance lens, rather than a content lens, suggests that social media technical architectures and policies actually pose several challenges to communication rights as well as to the open Internet. There is an opportunity for Internet governance studies, which have primarily focused on governmental policies and new global institutions, to give greater consideration to the direct policymaking role of private intermediaries and the accompanying phenomenon of the privatization of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]