The Ethnography of Infrastructure

• What exactly must be studied in order to study infrastructure?

Theorizing System development across time and space

• Invisibility
• Dependence on human practices
• Modularity (one piece of infrastructure is never really under the control of one single actant)
• Standardization
• Momentum

Some Notes

Infrastructure Properties

• Embeddedness
• Transparency
• Reach or scope
• Learned as part of membership
• Links with conventions of practice
• Embodiment of standards
• Built on an installed base
• Becomes visible upon breakdown
• Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally

Tricks of the trade

• Identifying master narratives and “others”
• Surfacing invisible work
• Paradoxes of infrastructure

Reading information infrastructure

• as a material artifact (physical and pragmatic properties)
• as a trace or record of activities (information collecting device, assistant and cultural artifact)
• as a veridical representation of the world