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Title: Introduction - Digital Infrapuncture Slug: 01-s1-introduction-digital-infrapuncture Date: 2020-11-01 12:00 Summary: Digital infrapuncture is a speculative term that can help reframe the perception of the stress points that an infrastructure could have. [perhaps give some examples of stress points, now it is really abstract]
Digital infrapuncture is a speculative term that can help reframe the perception [<- I don't understand this idea of reframing the perception, be more concrete e.g. it draws attention to stress points in infrastructure and stimulates thinking about how to intervene] of the stress points that an infrastructure could have. In a talk she presented in 2016 called Identifying the point of it all: Towards a Model of "Digital Infrapuncture"1, [add Deb] Verhoeven [add Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and Cultural Informatics at the University of Alberta] develops this concept in relation to the field of digital humanities.
Informed by the work of scholar [add Bethany] Nowviskie2, 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 repair3
- and their capacity to bring things (back) together
If we understand an infrastructure as a relational structure - or in other words - as a technology that brings things (back) together, we can start to critically enquire where infrastructures fails to do so.
What are examples of infrastructures that do not bring things together anymore [delete? it seems to be the same question as on line 24]?
How does an infrastructure connect? And how are these connections constructed and formatted? [it seems this should be the first question]
Who is an infrastructure bringing together? And who not? What are the conditions and possibilities for connection they provide? Where do they not connect and concequently exclude people?
And, most importantly, who can [perhaps rephrase as 'who has the access and agency to'] actually intervene in the design of infrastructures? And how?
Footnotes & Further readings
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Verhoeven, Deb. "Opening Keynote: Identifying the point of it all: Towards a Model of 'Digital Infrapuncture'" Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (2016) https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/opening-keynote-identifying-point-it-all-towards-model-digital-infrapuncture ↩︎
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Nowviskie, Bethany. "On Capacity and Care" Bethany Nowviskie (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 ↩︎