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This is the repository for the online module Bots as Digital Infrapuncture, commissioned by the Utrecht University
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bots-as-digital-infrapunctures/content/Section 1 - Digital Infrapu.../1-introduction.md

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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 draws attention to stress points in infrastructures and stimulates thinking about how to intervene. As infrastructures enable privacy breaches through user data extraction, or determine the agency of the user, or may perpetuate systemic inequalities through their very design, paying attention to the harms they produce is paramount.

Digital infrapuncture is a speculative term that draws attention to stress points in infrastructures and stimulates thinking about how to intervene. In a talk she presented in 2016 called Identifying the point of it all: Towards a Model of "Digital Infrapuncture"1, Deb Verhoeven, who is the 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 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

A screenshot of the last slide from Verhoeven's presentation.

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 fail to do so.

How does an infrastructure connect? And how are these connections constructed and formatted?

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 consequently exclude people?

And, most importantly, who has the access and agency to actually intervene in the design of infrastructures? And how?


Footnotes & Further readings

  1. 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 ↩︎

  2. Nowviskie, Bethany. "On Capacity and Care" Bethany Nowviskie (2015) Accessed 18 September, 2020. http://nowviskie.org/2015/on-capacity-and-care/ ↩︎

  3. 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 ↩︎