 Thank you very much for coming to the second Digital Humanities Utah Symposium. My name is David Rowe. I'm the co-director along with Rebecca Cummings of the Symposium, an assistant professor of English. Rebecca Cummings of the Marriott Library. She really deserves a lot of credit for putting this together. Before we get started, I have a few thank yous I need to express at the Marriott Library for providing the space, the BYU Humanities Center, the Department of English and the Tanner Humanities Center, along with the College of Humanities, our dean Diane Harris has been very supportive. She unfortunately cannot be here today, she's at a different conference. A couple announcements before we get started. If you haven't had a chance to go and check out the Diner Rounds, can you guys all hear me? Okay. Check out the Diner Rounds at the registration desk. If you are unfamiliar with Salt Lake City and you don't have plans for dinner tonight, you can sign up. I'll take some of the guest work out for you and you can sign up and meet up with some other people so you don't have to awkwardly glom onto each other and figure out what you're going to do for dinner. The Gold Auditorium is going to be our respite space throughout the day and all throughout tomorrow. So we will have continual beverage service. So at any point you feel hungry or thirsty, please come back here and partake. Let's see. We have our Twitter at, I'm sorry, Utah DH conference. So please follow us there and if you are going to be tweeting or doing any kind of social media activity, please use our hashtag, DH Utah. Also please stick around after the keynote, we're going to be having a little social hour from 5 to 6 p.m. We'll have some beverages and some hot appetizers to get you going for dinner. So when I arrived to Utah about a year and a half ago, I wanted to get a sense of what kind of work people were doing in the digital humanities and I had a chance to visit BYU's Office of Digital Humanities, Jeremy Brown, who was really kind enough to host me and we had some interesting discussions about what people were doing. Maybe we should reach out and see what other people are doing at different institutions and we could have some fruitful conversations and perhaps collaborations. So Jeremy took it upon himself to start organizing a little get-together. He thought maybe 5, 6, maybe 10 people would show up and quickly spun out of control and turned out into the first Utah digital humanities symposium, much to his chagrin. And it was there that thanks to his pioneering efforts that we were able to generate a little bit of momentum and some interest that perhaps will lead to some longer lasting relationships. But much to my surprise and chagrin, it was that the first symposium that he decided to announce that we were going to be hosting the next symposium. And so I said, Rebecca and I turned to each other and said, I guess this is happening, so it's happening. So that's what we're doing this year. But to keep with tradition, I would like to announce that whether they like it or not, Utah State University is going to be hosting the next one. So for 2017, Rebecca and I decided to open up the symposium to the greater inner mountain west region. We were really interested in seeing what our neighbor states were doing, but concentrating of course on institutions in Utah. When you'll find the excellent panels we have lined up for this symposium are represented scholars working in many different fields. And it's reflective of the multivalent nature of the digital humanities. At the same time, while we're debating and defining, refining the contours of the field, we at Utah are interested in exploring, I think, an identity that's reflective of our local interests and needs. So it's no accident, for example, that we are hosting this symposium here at the Marriott Library, because it's been a very conscious and strategic key partnership that the College of Humanities has had with the Marriott Library in institutionalizing digital humanities here. And we really do recognize that it doesn't make sense for us to simply try to replicate what people at UVA are doing, what Nebraska is doing, what Stanford is doing. We're really interested in exploring partnerships that incorporate our local interests, including information studies, archival study, library studies, and possibly tapping into materials that take advantage of the rich history of the Mountain West region. And we are, of course, very excited to see what people are doing at Utah State. Weber State, BYU, Dixie States on the Utah, Westminster, Utah Valley, and as much as digital humanities is about a national and international conversation, I think this symposium is really integral to our stakeholders in formulating a local conversation. So that's enough from me. Let me introduce you to our keynote speaker. So I'm really pleased to have the honor of introducing our keynote speaker, Alan Liu. He's a distinguished professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He's published extensively on romanticism and digital humanities, including his books, Wordsworth, The Sense of History, The Laws of Cool, Knowledge and Work, Knowledge Work, and the Information Culture, or Culture and Information, and Local Transcendence, Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. His recipient of numerous awards, NEH, ACL, S.Gubingheim, Fulbright, really the list goes on. And his latest project is ForkHumanities.org, an advocacy initiative for the public outreach for expressing the importance of the humanities. But for me and many others, Alan will always be associated with his now wonderfully retro website portal, Voice of the Shuttle. Despite its aggressively 90s aesthetic, for many years, it was the repository, the portal for humanity scholarship. And in the early days of DEH, and for many academics, it was an unwrap to the information superhighway. But I think it's fitting that that image is really kind of seared into my consciousness as it's a snapshot in time and a medium that moves at the speed of light. For a scholar who's always been interested in a sense of history, it's appropriate that his work becomes part of internet and digital humanities lore. If there's one constant in Alan's work, it's that he's always been interested in with this chosen subject's historicity. I'm gonna tell you a story about Alan, it might be apocryphal. So please correct me. But in the early days of his building, Voice of the Shuttle, it wasn't simply enough for him to put together the HTML code and host it on a remote web server. He had to have access to the actual machine that would host a site. So legend has it that if you could find him working in the middle of Night in South Hall tinkering, that's surrounded by computer parts. And this is really a completely unnecessary measure on his part. He could have easily formed out that labor to a professional web host. But this strikes me as a distinctly Alan maneuver. It's distinctly Alan thing to do. He had to touch the materiality of his site. He had to feel its texture. He had to know its shape, where it begins and ends. And I have no doubt that Alan continued to tinker into the night, sussing out the shape of the digital humanities. Please help me and join me in welcoming Alan Liu. Thank you, it's a really wonderful introduction, Dave. Thank you for coming to the event today. This is my first time here in Salt Lake City and I believe in Utah as well. I'm really pleased to be here for any number of reasons. One of them just joined me, my old friend and member of my cohort in graduate school at Stanford University, Vince Chang, from the English Department here. I have five former graduate students here. I'm anxious to get a picture with them later on. Dave Roe, Lisa Swanstrom, Billy Hall. Let's see, Julia Panko is somewhere and this Calaway is here as well. In fact, David and Lisa is half the team really of an old project of ours called the Agrippa Files, which is still well used online. David remembers almost correctly, it's not quite apocryphal. I did actually do the build for the first web server in our English Department and therefore Humanities site on our campus one night. Not the hardware but the software. And if you know what that's like in those early days, build means iteratively building and unbuilding and rebuilding the entire software system. It was a 24 hour endeavor and I remember reading all of David Lodge's work, nice work during that event. So I don't usually give a presentation off of a electronic device, because my eyes are no longer good enough for this. But I ended up doing some surgery on the talk last night and didn't have a printer, so there it is. Let me set the foundation first. My topic today is infrastructure. More accurately, since there is no infrastructure except as objectified perspectivally, my topic is infrastructure from the viewpoint of the digital humanities. A prevalent contemporary understanding of the humanities and arts with apologies to Matthew Arnold is that their highest mission is to interpret the best and worst, which has been thought instead in culture. But the critical and not just of knowing but of ethically evaluating and acting on it sometimes to the point today of social activism. If that's the case, then the question has been asked sometimes quite pointedly as in the Los Angeles Review Books article in the digital humanities last year, how well, if at all, do the digital humanities contribute to the humanities mission as opposed simply to merging the humanities into the neoliberal knowledge work? The most constructive way to address that question, I think, is to realize that it's actually a model of two questions. The unintelligent or misinformed one is can or should the digital humanities be doing interpretation and critique in common with other humanists? The answer is simply yes, though a more detailed answer would need to drill down into how the very notions of interpretation and critique today are shifting as their scholarly primitives to borrow a phrase from John Unsworth, their protocols of evidence, pattern finding, description, representation, comparison, etc., are shifting. The more productive sharply focused question, however, is the following, which I think will repay digital humanists well to think carefully through. What kind of critical interpretation is uniquely appropriate and purposive for the digital humanities? That is, what kinds of interpretation and critique not only allow the digital humanities to join up with leading modes of humanities research, but cannot be conducted except through digital humanities methods that lead in their own Metier. That being to use technology self-reflexively as part of the very knowledge and not just the instrument of researching and acting ethically on society. I suspect there'll be many kinds of answers to that latter question that will unfold over the coming years, including the potential of digital humanities to address issues of big data and algorithmic culture. But the answer I pose today is that the digital humanities are uniquely placed to interpret and critique culture at the level of infrastructure. For infrastructure, the social, cum, technological, and the you that at once enables the fulfillment of human experience and enforces constraints on that experience, today has much of the same scale, complexity, and general cultural impact as the idea of culture itself. Indeed, it may be that in late modernity, the experience of infrastructure at institutional scales undergirded by national or regional infrastructures such as electricity grids and global infrastructures such as the internet is operationally the experience of culture. For another way, the word infrastructure can now give us the same kind of general purchase on social complexity that Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and others sought when they reached for their all-purpose word, culture, a generation or two ago. Consider the way dystopian films produce a very onset of the digital information age, such as Blade Runner 1982 and Mad Max films beginning in 1979 characterized whole cultures by foregrounding infrastructure. In the former, glistening noir cityscapes defined by transportation and media technologies. In the latter, desert landscapes defined by fuel and water supply systems. I guess I should add here ski resorts as well. Those films gave us a taste of the way late modern infrastructure and indeed the landscape and environment as interwoven with infrastructure is increasingly the mise-en-scene of culture. As Rosalind Williams wrote in her influential 1993 essay, cultural origins and environmental implications of large technical systems. Infrastructure is, and these are her words, the outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape. And continuing to quote from Williams, what human values and relationships are represented in the cultural landscape of the late 20th century, she asked, especially in the dominance of pathways over settlements. If you read her essay, it's all about the increasing dominance of transportation channels and conduits over place and settlement. Not just filmic near future or post-apocalyptic fantasy life, in other words, but daily life in our modern cultural landscape steeps us in pervasive encounters with transportation, media, and other infrastructures. These do not just mutually convey the experience of culture, but are visibly parts of our cultural experience. Late modernity is thus car culture, cable TV culture, I need to update that to Netflix culture, internet culture, smartphone culture, and any other kind of cool culture. Whereas I studied in my book, The Laws of Cool, which is a cultural effect of both smart technologies and the knowledge workers who use them to be, or at least look like, they're smart. Cool, as it were, is transport in another sense, an engineered zen transporting us not out of daily life, but deeper into its habituated routines, secretly yearning for enlightenment. The consequence of such convergence between infrastructure and culture for humanistic critique may thus be predicted as follows. Especially in the digital humanities, critique must now begin to focus on infrastructure in order to have any hope of creating tomorrow's equivalents of the great cultural critical statements of the past. Tomorrow's Ifi Thompson writing about the making and working of the working class, C. Wright Mills writing about white collars, Raymond Williams about culture and society, Michelle Foucault about discipline, Judith Butler about gender and performativity, Donna Haraway about cyborgs, or Homi Baba about hybridity, among many others, obviously, who could be cited here. They will need to include in their works attention to infrastructure, as that cyborg being who's making, working, disciplining, performance, gendering, and hybridity are increasingly part of the core identity of late modern culture, in ways no longer fully describable in older schemes of ideology critique. According to which infrastructure underlies an alternate rather than thoroughly intermeshed reality of superstructure. And you're familiar with the old Martian scheme of infrastructure versus superstructure. Just for shadow where I'm going by the end of this talk, my thesis is that increasingly, our formal organizational institutions together are bringing the two into completely interwoven forms, meshing them together here in a pile of ethernet cables so that the infrastructure and the superstructure are really hand in hand, or rather port to cable with each other. So that was the foundational section of my talk. The second section is titled Support Being One Method. What would the method for additional humanities cultural criticism focused on infrastructure look like? To give it a colorful name, I imagine that the method separating, of supporting such criticism must be agile. I borrowed this adjective from a contemporary approach to software development that considered technically is rapid ad hoc and incremental, and considered socially as iterative, adaptable and collaborative. Epitomized in so-called software development scrums, if you've heard that term, with the rapid burst sprints of collaborative work. Now, this isn't a side because I haven't fully developed this. I don't actually like the hypermasculinist metaphor of the scrum here for collaborative software development work. I did a lot of research one year for a project that I never completed on a history of patchwork quilting in the US, and I myself think that a much better metaphor is that of the patchwork quilt or the quilting party, especially when you consider the fact that, by today, the metaphor of the quilt associated with ones like the kaleidoscope, the mosaic, and so on, it become interwoven with the notion of diversity and multiculturalism, especially also considering the fact that fabric work goes way back into the history of computing itself much more than rugby, certainly by any chance. So, as you may know, this is a Jackard loom whose punch card system of programming the weaving designs was adopted by Charles Babbage for his early 19th century computing engines. If you look at the online resources and interfaces for agile software development and scrums today, illustrated on the left, you'll see that the systems design actually facilitate them such as the Trello-based team collaboration system based in the Japanese Kanban system actually looks like little patchwork quilts in place, one card after another, rapidly adjusted in adjacencies one to another and shuffled around. Anyway, that's a big aside there. In any case, not great systems of software formally modeled to near platonic specs by gigantic top-down consortiums, but scrums and quilting parties of agile, rapid release, results-oriented, and adaptive software issued informally by teams. Less colorfully, the style of digital humanities infrastructure critique, I imagine, one that takes advantage of modes of thinking already prevalent in the field, may be called, and this is certainly much more prosaic a term than the notion of agility scrums and quilting parties, lightly anti-foundationalist. The question that I concoct this prosaic phrase to answer is how much anti-foundationalism, or perhaps anti-groundwork, to allude to Marx's gruneries for a critique of political economy, is actually useful for critical infrastructure studies. Mainstream humanistic critique has often been anti-foundationalist all the way down, according to a three-stage logic that might be outlined somewhat as follows. And here, those of you who've read Rita Felsky's recent book, the Critique of Critique, will realize that my argument is roughly consonant with her argument, especially since she pursues the part through the analysis of infrastructural spatial metaphors, such as the character that stands of the critic who digs into the fissures and gaps of the subject matter, or, as she puts it, stands back from it. In his first logical moment, Critique has often recognized that the real, true, or lawful groundwork that is the infrastructure for anything, especially the things that matter most to people, such as the allocation of goods or the assignation of identity is ungrounded. For example, what there are material reasons for resource allocation and the social relations of force to do the dirty deed, that is for political economy and society, any particular political economy and society are arbitrary and in the last analysis unjust. Political economy and society are thus not grounds, but to play on the word precisely groundworks, particular ways of working in the ground, that is a mode of production, Marx would have called it, supported by discursive, epistemic, psychic, and cultural institutions for ensuring that the work continues in the absence of good, rational, or moral foundations. In its second logical moment, Critique then goes anti-foundationalist to a second degree by criticizing its own standing in the political economic system, a recursion effect attested in now quite familiar post-May 1968 worries that critics themselves are complicit in elitism, in bourgeois-mant, recuperation, containment, and majoritarian identity, not to mention tenure. Finally, in its third logical moment, Critique has sought often to turn his complicity to advantage. For example, by positioning critics as what Foucault called embedded or specific intellectuals acting on a particular institutional scene to steer social forces, a related idea is to go tactical in the manner theorized by Michel Desertaux, who argued that people immured in any system can appropriate that system's infrastructure through bottom-up agency for deviant purposes. As you recall in his book, the leading example is Jay walking in the infrastructure of a city. Media critics, including new media critics, have adapted Desert, my Twitter stream is continuing down this, it's very odd. I'm sure that I see tweets from the audience here. Media critics, including new media critics, have adapted Desertaux's notion in the name of what they call tactical media, meaning media whose platforms, channels, and interface, the whole of what Lisa Parks and Nicole Stereo-Selsky has recently called media infrastructures can be appropriated by users for alternative means. From that total three-part anathetical logic of critique that I've just outlined, we can observe that the digital humanities often tend to slice out just a latter tactical moment. Such slicing, hacking critique to sever its roots from purest anti-foundationalism, brings the digital humanities into the orbit of several late or post-critical approaches with a very similar style. And I carefully choose the word style because these are not fully thought through philosophies, they're not theories in a foundational sense. One approach that James Smithies has associated with the digital humanities is post-foundationalism, Missy calls it. Borrowing from the philosopher of science, Dmitry Genev, Smithies argues that post-foundationalism is, quote, an intellectual position that balances the distrust of grand narrative with an acceptance that methods honed over centuries and supported by independently verified evidence can lead, if not the truth itself, then closer to it than we were before. So you see this position wants to have its cake and eat it, too, to disband many narratives, but also to believe in things like positivism and progressivist truth. Post-foundationalism is thus well matched to the digital humanities, Smithies suggests. We think of the digital humanities as, quote, a process of continuous methodological and theoretical refinement that produces research outputs as snapshots of an ongoing activity rather than the culmination of completed research, close quote. A related idea is Michael Dieter's of critical technical practice, which, building on Philip Agri's writings on artificial intelligence research makes a goal, he makes a goal of the digital humanities. Dieter quotes from Agri, and I'm quoting here. The word critical does not call for pessimism and destruction, but rather for an expanded understanding of the conditions and goals of technical work. Instead of seeking foundations, would embrace the impossibility of foundations, guiding itself by continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a historically specific practice, close quote. Not a surprising statement at all by humanists, but a surprising one from a computer science and artificial intelligence researcher. Other ideas that are lightly anti-foundationalist in this way include David Berry's notion of tactical infrastructures, Bruno Latour's idea of compositionism, takes on neither absolute foundations of knowledge nor absolutist refutations of such foundations, but instead on mixed, impure, make-do-and-can-do compositions, as he puts it, of multiple positions. And Akbar Abbas' poor theory, it's a nice phrase, which uses, and I'm quoting, tools at hand and limited resources to engage with heterogeneous probings, fragmentary thinking, and open-endedness in resistance to totalization, restriction, and closure. Finish quote. Also important is the recent emergence of feminist digital humanities approaches to infrastructure, as in the panel at the DH 2016 conference last year titled, Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities, which features Susan Brown, Tanya Clement, Laura Mandel, Debra Holden, and Jackie Verneman. Applying feminist principles in a way that's consonant with what I call lightly anti-foundationalist, the participants ask in their panel abstract quote, how can digital infrastructure, as technologies of connection, support complex, non-binary understanding, close quote. Whereas Bear Holden puts it in a really wonderful, brilliant essay of years of the same year, titled As Luck Would Habit, Serendipity and Solace in Digital Research Infrastructure, quote, a feminist digital archive would replace a technical ontology built on balanced binary narratives with a set of principles that allow for the discernment of conflicting, asymmetrical, and incomplete vantage points. Close quote. All these lightly anti-foundationalist approaches reviewed here, you may be noted, are tactical rather than strategically pure because their very potential for critique arises from dirty hands proximity to and sometimes even partnership with their objects of critique. As in the case of the devil's bridges, and you'll see some of them illustrated at the top of Bear Holden's article that she makes her fable, such approaches have to at least get near the devil's work to see its infrastructure. Unlike the stantiated critique and what Felsky calls its stand back mode, that is tactical critique, as a root of the word tactic might indicate, has to make contact. Smith's notes post foundations function as a bridging concept for the interdependence and entanglement of the digital humanities with post industrialism. Indeed, I'll add that all the approaches I've so far mentioned are as a light foundation for critical infrastructure studies are similarly contaminated by the double principle of efficiency and flexibility, which as I've articulated elsewhere is the two stroke engine of the post industrial mode of production. As it were, all the approaches I mentioned are instances of lean and just-in-time critique, and thus not dissimilar in spirit to the in-house critique that post-industrial corporations at the end of the 20th century began to design into their own production lines by famously empowering workers to stop the line at Hawke or less catastrophically to suggest incremental improvements. Such dirty contact with post industrialism is both the weakness and strength of lightly anti-foundationalist approaches, or weakness means being swallowed up by the system, and strength comes from getting close enough to the system to those critical points of inflection, difference, and change. If as Smithy says, the digital humanities are deeply entangled in post industrialism, in other words, entanglement need not be the same as equivalence, it can also be non-binaryistic engagement. Now the critical potential of light anti-foundationalism in the digital humanities, criticism light, if you will, can now be stated. It is precisely the ability to treat infrastructure not as a foundation or anti-foundation, but instead as a tactical medium that opens the possibility of critical infrastructure studies as I and others had begun calling it. A couple of us are beginning to think about putting in the MLA session together on that particular topic. It is critical infrastructure studies as a mode of cultural studies that will allow the digital humanities to fulfill one of the most needed critical functions that it can take on, I think, at the present time, which is this, to help adjudicate how academic infrastructure connects higher education to, but also differentiates it from the workings of other institutions in advanced technological societies. The critical function of the digital humanities going forward, in other words, is to assist in shaping smart, ethical, academic infrastructures that not only further normative academic work, research, pedagogy, advising, administration, and so on, but also helps intelligently transfer some, but not all values and practices in both directions between higher education and today's other powerful institutions, business, law, medicine, government, the medium, the creative industries, the NGOs, and so on. So session two is another support beam, one more plank of method, although this one I won't be able to lay completely in place. At present, some of the most influential general understandings of infrastructure, as cited, for example, by such digital humanists as Sheila Anderson and James Smithies working on humanities research cyber infrastructure in particular, include the large systems, technical systems LTS approach, descended originally from the historian Thomas Hughes massively influential book of 1983 titled, Networks of Power, and the information ethnography approach, stemming from Susan Lee Starr, Jeffrey Balker, and their circle. Good expositions of both are combined in one of the best conceptualizations of infrastructure I've so far found. It's on the right there. It's a report of 2007 titled, Understanding Infrastructure, Dynamics, Tensions, and Design, one of its authors is Balker. It's the white paper for an NSF conference that he helped organize. Supplementing these general approaches to infrastructure, I propose another portfolio of thought that to my knowledge has not yet been introduced directly to infrastructure studies. It's also a portfolio largely unknown in the digital humanities and from that matter in the humanities as a whole, even though it is broadly compatible with humanities cultural criticism. Because powerful institutions, business, law, medicine, government, the media, and the others that I mentioned, are today the actors that most forcefully innovate to use their word, systems, designed to fuse cultural experience to infrastructure. We need a good way to study those institutions and the infrastructures they put in place. The portfolio study that I suggest consists of the neo-institutionalist approach to organizations in the social sciences and consonant with it, so-called social constructionist, and especially in the mode that Anthony Giddens said in place, adaptive structuration approaches to organizational technologies in the social sciences and the information sciences. Taken together, these approaches explore how organizations are structured as social institutions by so-called carriers of beliefs and practices that is the culture of a corporation, for example, among which information technology infrastructure is increasingly crucial. Importantly, these approaches are a social science version of what I've been calling lightly anti-foundationalists. Scholars in these areas see through the supposed rationality of organizations and their supporting infrastructures to the fact that they are indeed social institutions with all the irrationality that that implies. But they're less interested in exposing the ungrounded nature of organizational institutions and infrastructures as if it were possible rather to live outside them in modern society today than in illuminating and pragmatically guiding the agencies and factors involved in their making and unmaking. Such approaches are thus inherently a good match for the epistemology of building and unbuilding and rebuilding in the digital humanities. More than a good match, I think that neo-institutionalism in the social science of organizational technologies offer exactly the right tactical opening for digital humanities cultural criticism because they are all about the site on which the already existing critical force of the digital humanities is pent up, locked up today. And that's institutional forms of technologically assisted knowledge work. After all, the digital humanities standing contrast to my colleagues down the hall, for example, the new media scholars and network critics and others among cousin fields as a branch of digitally focused humanities work that has been primarily focused on changing, well, research, authorship, dissemination, teaching inside academic institutions and related cultural or heritage institutions rather than on going out there and being active in society, talking about surveillance, talking about the military, engaging in a more direct way with society. The digital humanities are thus all about creating research collections in corpora, developing analytical publishing curatorial and hybrid pedagogical tools, establishing new university programs and centers, changing accepted notion of academic careers, for example, to include out act or alternative career trajectories, and ultimately instilling a new scholarly digital ethos in the academy in the name of collaboration and open access. As a consequence, the existing critical energy of the digital humanities, sometimes quite passionate and even militant, has been primarily devoted to such institutional issues. Breaking down the paywalls of closed publication infrastructures, for instance, is the digital humanities version of storming a university administration building of 1970s. I won't be able to complete the argument here, but it'll be useful at least to put in place an initial primer to new institutionalism as a method that helps us frame the question, how do today's so-called knowledge work institutions, not just corporations, but the university know, and how do knowledge, excuse me, information technology infrastructures shape such knowing, an updated version of Mary Douglas's question to the mid 1980s, how do we institutions think? Neo-institutionism addresses such questions. This is the influential approach to organizational institutions that arose among sociologists and organization theorists beginning in the early 1980s. Detailed explications of the method and narratives of its development are available in the canonical volume of essays edited by Water Powell and Paul de Magel. It's often called by the sociologist, their orange Bible, the new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Such applications are also available in more recent synthesis or collections, such as Richard Scott's institutions and organizations, and the sage handbook of organizational institutionalism edited by Royston Greenwood and others, especially the introduction to that work, which I recommend. I would offer here, as I moved toward my conclusion, just an outsider's outline of neo-institutionalism intended to make it accessible to humanists. This is how I explain it to myself. In my redaction, which I'm actually gonna redact here even more into bullet points, the neo-institutional view of the nature and behavior of organizational institutions may be put in the form of the following sequence of propositions. One, organizations have an institutional dimension that is not the same as our organizational structures and processes, that's the premise of this entire field. Two, the institutional dimension of organizations is non-rational and relational, even when, or especially when, organizations appear to be rational in maximizing resources to reach defined goals. In short, neo-institutionalism's answer to my question, how do institutions think, is, well, they don't think. They like to act like they're thinking. Three, intra-organizationally, institutions are motivated by different combinations of agency enacted by different strato personnel. In particular, neo-institutionists speak of the so-called three pillars of institutional motivation. These are their words for them, regulative, normative, and cultural cognitive, which together, though in different ways, impel people to conform to, think in terms of, or take for granted, institutional conventions. So very roughly translated, regulative means what someone tells you to do, normative means what everyone does, and cultural cognitive means what you've internalized so deeply that it's unthinkable not to do it. Four, extra-organizationally, institutions are motivated by the collective behaviors and taken for granted thinking of their organizational field and environment. So everyone wants to be what Apple is, or Google, et cetera. Five, and you'll begin to see here why this has such critical potential for people like myself in higher education thinking about these issues. Both intra and extra-organizationally, institutionalization tends to be a convergent process. This is especially damning for the higher education institution today because as one of the so-called soft institutions with unclearly defined goals or rather multiple goals, we are under increasing pressure from the so-called hard institutions with a clear bottom line to respect their convergent processes and their measurements of value. Six, and this is why I'm particularly excited by this approach, new institutionalists note historically and through empirical evidence that organizations and organization of fields contain also dissonances that can also make institutionalization a divergent process. That's the critical crevice for thought about the relationship between higher education and other institutions today. So I haven't laid that beam completely in place. They're there in sketch form. And the third support beam will be there even more sketchily. This is like the construction people just laying out the beam, not quite ready to rivet it in place. I'm just gonna be able to show you by means of a couple of quotes, the matching part of the argument. The new institution is complimented, I said, by the social constructionist and adaptive structuration approaches to institutional technologies. And this is roughly what that means. This is from Richard Scott. Organizational students of technology earlier treated complex technologies embodied in both hardware and software as a unidirectional and deterministic influence impacting organizational structure and behavior. But later theorists reacted by emphasizing the socially constructed nature of technology and the extent to which these effects are mediated by situational factors and interpretive processes. The most important characteristics of artifacts is that they all embody both technical and symbolic elements. The furthest this line of thought has been taken is by such critics of socially organized technologies as Wanda Orlikowski, who was influenced by Anthony Giddens' so-called adaptive structuration thesis. She writes, for example, technology is the product of human action while it also assumes structural properties that is technology is physically constructed by actors working in a given social context and technology is socially constructed by actors throughout through the different meanings they attach to it and the various features they emphasize and use. However, it is also the case that once developed and deployed, technology tends to become reified and institutionalized, losing its connection with the human agents that constructed it or gave it meaning and it appears to be part of the objective structural properties of the organization. You see the gist of the explanation there. This is an antithetical explanation. It's an attempt to account for the fact that we understand organizational technologies be reified structures givens something we can't do anything about. University has already bought into Google as for education, it costs a gazillion dollars. There's nothing you can do about it. And also for the flip side of the argument that somebody there designed that system in the first place, gave a symbolic meaning, a cultural meaning, those two go hand in hand. And in fact, it's the going hand in hand which is the momentum behind this critical impulse in this methodology. While the Calci continues, agency and structure are not independent. It's the ongoing action of human agents in habitually drawing on a technology that objectifies and institutionalizes it. Thus if agents change their technology physically or interpretively, every time they used it, you would not assume the stability and taken for grantedness that is necessary for institutionalization. But such a constantly evolving interaction with technology would undermine many of the advantages that accrue from using technology to accomplish work. We don't actually need to physically or socially reconstruct a telephone elevator or typewriter every time we use it. However, there clearly are occasions where continued unreflective use of technologies inappropriate or ineffective, or we can expect a greater engagement of human agents during the initial development of a technology. This does not discount the ongoing potential for users to change it physically and socially throughout their interaction with it. In using a technology, users interpret appropriate and manipulate it in various ways. That too is an opening for a critical infrastructure studies. So I'm going to conclude by topping off the structure. We have, and as you see completed the building, what I've done at best is to put in place a plan of research. One of many possible ones that bring the digital humanities in the university into contact with knowledge work in other institutions in a common endeavor of creating, using, evolving, but also thinking critically about infrastructure. It's enough of a plan perhaps to provide the platform for me to close by asking this series of critical questions. Can neo-institutional and social structuration of technology approaches to understanding the evolving relation between the academic institution and today's more domineering institutions, most notably business and government, help the digital humanities release its intramural critical energy. Can that release help propel not just change in higher education, but through higher education and the technological infrastructures that mediate its relationship to other institutions, also extramural change in the larger society that higher ed contributes to? In short, can the considerable existing intelligence, idealism and moral force of the digital humanities at its best be redirected from being only an instrument of institution work to be coming through interventions in instrumental infrastructure, also a way to act on institutions and their wider social impact? But I don't wish to overreach, which is also why I think an approach focused on institutions and their infrastructures is particularly appropriate. Ultimately, the digital humanities field must be critical in a way that does not ask it inauthentically to reach beyond its expertise and mandate to bear exaggerated responsibility for larger social phenomena. Acting out through the digital humanities about larger social issues is necessary, but such actions must be complimented by creating infrastructures and practices that make their social impact by being what Susan Lee Starr calls boundary objects. In this case, boundary objects situated between the academic institution and other major social institutions. It is in this boundary zone, just as one example, content management system infrastructures who's used by scholars oscillates between corporate managed and open community philosophies that higher education can most pertinently influence and be influenced by other institutions through what I earlier called shared by contested information technology infrastructure. It's in this boundary zone of hybrid scholarly pedagogical and administrative institutional infrastructure that we need the attention of skilled and thoughtful digital humanists, even if the interventions they make are not called anything as ambitious as activism, but instead simply building. So, I've got a coda. What infrastructure means to me? This is actually the assignment for an event in London that I went to where we all had to give a two minute presentation on what the infrastructure means to us. So this is what infrastructure means to me. It's partly personal and part of it is very early blue skies thinking. I haven't really fleshed out the skeleton of logic here. This will all change in the future as I work on it. I visited the World Trade Center Memorial just before it was topped off in 2013. And this is a tweet I sent from there. Morning from my dad today at WTC Memorial. Not a 9-11 victim, a chief engineer of Twin Towers. So much of him is here. So a moment to honor my father. Ernest T. Liu, 1924 to 2011. Worked for the Skelling-Helly Christiansen-Robertson firm from 1960 to 1989. He was the chief designer of the foundation and the plaza buildings of the World Trade Center. So Ashley, that little toy building that I've been building, the visual components of that I took from leftover plans and programs that he was writing at his death. He was writing a program called Sea Beams for calculations of stresses on beams. So here's my thinking about what infrastructure is. Infrastructure is the concentration of social, economic, military, governmental, corporate, medical, religious, educational, and often also personally familiar or personal psychological power on a nationally or potentially concrete site where structures are built for the physical social designs of appropriation. Sometimes we call that extraction. Accumulation or storage, transformation or processing and exchange or transport. These kinds of designs are instrumental in regulating the underlying stresses whose balance is the foundational design necessary to any society. The stresses of stasis versus change, locality versus globality, hierarchy versus equality. Specific infrastructures are engineered in the forms of among others that could be listed, architecture, including land use and city planning, technology, and media. For example, if you've been to the World Trade Center Memorial, the digital consoles that ringin' around in a very interesting way, all part of Alisa Parks and the Costa Rioski called media infrastructures today. This is the actual program that the designer of the names on the monument, Gerrith Thorpe, used to place the names in position. As you know, the names were not listed alphabetically. They're listed by means of adjacency at time of death, but also of social adjacency in terms of institutions and families, honoring many kinds of family requests a very difficult problem, especially since the ordering of the names had to match up with the physical constraints of the block by block surround of the parapet of the Twin Towers there, media technologies. And my own contribution today, also institutions. I can't tell the number of times my dad came home swearing at the New York New Jersey Port Authority. In historical view, modernity and post-modernity have substantially increased the relative importance of the following in infrastructure. Hybrid designs of appropriation, accumulation, transformation, exchange, linkages between technology and media, and the dominance of particular institutional forms, especially the corporation. But just of this, you know you're in the presence of foundational infrastructure when even where specific structures fall and collision with other infrastructures. For example, the World Trade Center versus the World Air System as co-opted by World Terrorism, revenant structures of architectural, technological, medium, institutional, and psychological power rise again to make even the haunting absence of structure. For example, those visually bottomless twin pits at the WTC Memorial, the blueprint of new infrastructure. Yeah, I'd be pleased to entertain any questions or thoughts or comments really. This is our early work. The bullet point you saw at the end is scratching the napkin at this point or the digital version of a napkin. Yes. Would you mind reversing that four point list that you had? Yeah, one more. Right, now one more. One more, okay. Okay, awesome. Because when I look at that, I look at exchange, I put dissemination in there. You have a great taxonomy for digital humanities projects right there in terms of extraction, storage, processing, analysis of the dissemination. And I mean, for me, I'm looking at the same, my in terms of digital humanities class, this could be the blueprint for our curriculum and it would replace John Linsworth's digital, our scholarly primitives. Yeah. Do you think that's appropriate? Yes, I very much think so. I'm planning a graduate seminar for next year on critical infrastructure studies and this could very well be the topic for entire days with that discussion. The overlaps, simultaneous, but also slight dissonances between different versions of understanding these terms. So right away between appropriation and extraction, we have different domains of industry at work with different traditions, different histories, potentially also different genders at play. Natalia Saesira, some years ago, wrote a penetrating essay about TAC versus YAC, the role of theory in the digital humanities. In one very memorable paragraph, she scrutinizes these colorful metaphors that digital humanities like to use. Metaphors like digging into data, like data mining and so on, for their heavily blue collar, male gendered tradition of work, she asked where the other kinds of gendered metaphors are. You can see that with all these terms, different industries, different histories, different populations, different domains of application would suggest different kinds of terminologies that partly overlap, partly don't with each other. Part of the richness of a society actually, I think, is how many different viewpoints, how many different perspectives on the act of appropriation, extraction, accumulation, storage, et cetera, it can take. Digital humanists have a role to play in contributing another vocabulary, another grammar, another ontology of these terms to either buttress or critique the ones that are already in place. So, actually, I should have recorded that because those are my seminar notes for next year. Yes. You talked a lot about something that's lightly anti-foundational, and yet your diagram began with a foundation. Yeah. So, is your approach anti-foundational lightly or lightly foundational or all of the above? It's all of the above. So, what I meant to suggest by that review of what I call might be anti-foundationalist ontologies and epistemologies is really captured by James Smithy's statement, his quotation I read at one point, which he says that light anti-foundationalism or, as he puts it, post-foundationalism wants to have something like a foundation and positive truth but still doesn't believe in the absoluteness of positive truth in meta-narratives. I think we can all kind of understand what's at stake here when you're engaged in a digital humanities project, for example, although I haven't mentioned many in the concrete here, you need to start with someone's set of methodologies, someone's set of tools, a set corpus that you have collected, even though you have profound distrust and skepticism about the nature of those tools, those methodologies and that corpus. So, you start there and you iterate. The real genius of the set of practices and we're all really ideologies of the digital humanities is the belief that iteration is good and that the final product is not the be all and end all. So, I have another whole thesis about this. I'm really engaged in teaching my graduate students and others about what I call the full ecosystem or cycle of the seminatory work that digital humanities brings to view and inculcates. That's one in which the be all and end all result of a research project is not the published monograph, not the article, not even the paper you give at a conference. It's the full set of activities, some of which are engaged in practical work, some in form of grant proposals, some in form of seminar work, planning work, et cetera. It's all one virtuous cycle in which the technical work and the practical work feeds into the higher level interpretive work which then feeds back iteratively into new practical and technical work suggesting new things you can do with your corpus or with your tools. That's part of what light anti-foundationalism means. It means there's no position in that full cycle of the seminatory, interpretive, critical, building and technical activities that is the master point of meaning. They all have meaning, supporting each other's methodologies and meanings. Yeah. Yeah, David. Thanks for your talk, Alan. This got me thinking about Perry's workshop this morning which was outlining for us the different kind of parameters for the ideal NEH grant application. And it seems like as much as your talk is about critical infrastructural studies as a vehicle for critiquing other institutions or creating some kind of force, numbering points for some kind of exchange occur, it seems like an undergirding that is an ethos of infrastructure, like a kind of set of guidelines for the ideal infrastructure that's going to allow for these kinds of exchanges to occur. And I wonder if that's accurate or if you're saying that this is merely just the kind of people who are kind of keen? I really see the emphasis on infrastructure that I'm placing on that concept today as being a kind of corrective. So in an ideal scenario, it's neither the larger, higher level interpretive activities that we're trained in as scholars that should reside nor should it be the infrastructural kinds of activities in thought. But as a corrective, I think that it's very solitary for graduate students in the humanities, social sciences and other programs to get an interaction today in the value of taking infrastructural perspective on things. As you know, from my graduate classes, I think that many of you have five of you in one way or another have taken at UC Santa Barbara. I'm a strong believer in getting the humanist fingers dirty under the hood as it were of the engine of the digital humanities. That doesn't mean that I believe that my students can come out being programmers. I don't even think that many of them will come out learning to do more than the initial exercise in, for example, Python or R programming or anything else. What's important is to look deep down enough in the infrastructure to understand conceptually what is there, what is possible to think about and how to talk to other people on campus about those embedded, not just hardware and tools but concepts as well. So why build a database or why build a particular kind of tool or repository if as a humanist you'll eventually be depending on other people to do that for real? It's because you need to understand what the concept of data is today as it is structured in different kinds of ways. You can't do that until you've gotten to the infrastructural level. The common cliche for what a computing system today is is they call it a stack. The computer is a severely stacked system that goes down layers and layers until you get to the point where we barely know how to talk about the electron pulses and signals at all. We need to get down deep enough in the stack so we understand a little bit about the transition between lower and upper levels that is shaping our industry today. I know that so much of my talk today was theoretical and abstract. Let me show you where the rubber meets the road to use an old-fashioned infrastructural term. I've been serving on several years on the high-level committee on my campus. It's now called the Information Technology Council which advises and reports to the presiding Information Technology Board consisting solely of deans and senior administrators. Our role is to vet, comment on and prioritize the multi-million dollar information technology projects on the table for the university. And over the last three years, our university, like many others in particular, has been preoccupied by where the university's infrastructural technology at the enterprise scale is moving, which cloud system it is going to adopt. Will it be the Microsoft 365 ecosystem or the Google apps for education ecosystem as if the universe were equally split down the middle and there was no remainder left over? I'm appalled by the fact that of the few faculty members that are involved in such committees and such processes, almost no one has any time to do the research and think about the long-term implications of these kinds of multi-million dollar decisions being put in place. Many of these enterprise scale systems, as I've seen them to come into existence, are motivated by back-end missions. These are incredibly important for the institution. For example, if you want your paycheck, you better be sure the payroll system works, but they're not core mission technologies in the sense that they're not supportive of either teaching or research. It tends to be the case that the big multi-million dollar decisions, at least as I've seen them, are put in place for the back-end support purposes first, and then whatever dollars are left over are for the research and pedagogy methodologies which are stacked up for 10 or more years down the line. And because they're given such a late position in the queue, no one bothers now to think about the long-term implications, not just infrastructural, but political, social, and otherwise. So for example, our university is moving toward Google apps for education on practical grounds. Practical grounds as measured on which is most efficacious for the reasons of email and calendaring systems. No one yet has thought through, once we've committed to this, what are the implications for Google in the classroom, for the Google data system, for everything else that research and pedagogy will reside on in the future? So that's why things like this matter. That's why I think thinking about infrastructure matters. Scholars, graduate students, and students really begin to need to think about infrastructure because otherwise other people will be doing the thinking for us, motivated by different goals and values. Okay, that's enough of me on the soapbox here. Any other questions? Yes, Lisa. I think it's amazing there's so much to think about. One thing that I'm thinking quite a lot about in response to that is the distinction that you mentioned between illuminating and exposing infrastructure. And I think that I'm not sure which text it was that you were drawing from or for that distinction, but especially in terms of natural ecologies, the management of natural resources is sort of something that is not patently visible, right? That kind of instruction by exposure or illumination would really be useful. And I wondered if you had a sense about maybe more tensions between those two things, between pulling the curtain, well, you know, from something as opposed to maybe a guideline or a through line. Yeah, it's a crucial point. I know that I'm going on too long, but let me just say a few words about that because it's something that I'm actually thinking about with my collaborators and students today. So one of the standard criticisms of the information technology industry enterprise technology systems and so on is that there's not enough transparency. The decisions at the design stage of engineering zone are not shared with others. The other stakeholders are not involved. There's just not enough visibility of what's happening one or two layers down the stack when things are being designed and put together. I come to the conclusion that the same critique can actually be labeled at the kinds of work we in the humanities and social sciences and other fields do. Traditionally, very little of our work has been transparent as measured by the same standards as we're bringing to enterprise technology today. So for example, when I say that I'm proud that my students come out of my classes learning how to close read, there's very little transparency about what the operations of close reading actually involve. Traditionally, we sort of believe in apprentices, apprentices system, you just need to be in my classes long enough to automatically absorb the procedures and protocols of good close reading. This now matters tremendously in the digital humanities when so much of our work consists of working with data sources, data sets, and data methodologies and tools that make a difference in the final results and conclusions. Serving on the editorial board of the new journal for cultural analytics, I know that we had a long discussion about what would be required in data transparency to back up with support the new kinds of articles being written in the cultural analytics field today. So we decided to mandate that authors support their articles with a repository of their data sets, as long as copyright allows, together with scripts and other materials in a dataverse repository kept by the journal. This is 10 years behind the times of the sciences, the open sciences movement, the open lab movement in the sciences had developed very sophisticated workflows often based in R for open data sets, open workflows, reproducible research, replicable research, and generalizable research. None of that is in place in the digital humanities now. So for example, when I asked Ryan Heuser where he got his 2,958 novels from, he said here and he pulled out a flash drive. So that at the moment is a standard for provenance, for workflow, for reproducibility, here do something with it. All that needs to be put in place for the kind of openness and transparency to work in the digital humanities. I'll close there. Thank you.