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Title: Introduction - Digital Infrapuncture Slug: 01-introduction-digital-infrapuncture
"Digital infrapuncture" is a speculative term that can help reframe the perception of the stress points that an infrastructure could have. In her opening talk for the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School called Identifying the point of it all: Towards a Model of "Digital Infrapuncture", Verhoeven develops this concept in relation to the field of digital humanities.
Informed by the work of scholar Nowviskie (Nowviskie 2015)1, Verhoeven asks for a rethinking of digital infrastructures in terms of capacity and care, by "developing an appreciation for where it hurts, where the sense of pain is in the worlds that we inhabit and study" and creating small scale interventions which can enkindle transformation on a larger scale.
In her presentation, she describes digital infrastructures according to their capacity to create the conditions of possibility for connection, their capacity for repair (Jackson, 2014)2, and their capacity to bring things (back) together.
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Nowviskie, Bethany. "On Capacity and Care" Bethany Nowviskie (blog). 4 October, 2015. Accessed 18 September, 2020. http://nowviskie.org/2015/on-capacity-and-care/ ↩︎
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Jackson, Steven J. "Rethinking Repair" Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014): 221-239. https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Jackson_RethinkingRepair(MITPress2014).pdf ↩︎