We live in a world connected not merely by technology but also by infrastructure, which seamlessly delivers data to our doors. What’s more, in today’s university, many a professor has become a designer of infrastructure as well as a consumer. While portals of this kind are developed by a minority of practicing scholars, they form one of the major digital complements that scholars tend to create for their traditional work. The reasons for this are seldom explicitly articulated in the existing literature that documents their use and purpose. The creation of public tools for visualizing data is increasingly important to many scholars, and it represents a non-negligible commitment in terms of time and grant money.

This article argues that that choice and commitment are best understood as a kind of work deeply informed by an engagement with certain values, including scholarly transparency and political participation, which often align with scholars’ moral commitments, intellectual heritage, and disciplinary traditions. Indeed, that alignment has been so powerful for many builders of scholarly data that they have chosen to pursue the building of infrastructure projects even when that choice was otherwise out of alignment with recognizable promotion incentives in their professional communities.

In many cases, the infrastructure project advances an argument: but if web portals existed merely to convey arguments to a broader audience, they could just as easily take the form of an open-access article or monography. Why, then, would a scholar or a scholarly team choose to invest their energy in designing and constructing a web project?

The pages that follow then attempt to answer the question: what values does infrastructure-building represent? This article begins by situating scholarly practices around infrastructure within a broader transformation of twenty-first century life and indeed scholarship and learning by infrastructures, and distinguishing “scholarly” infrastructure from other kinds of infrastructure designed to share information that nevertheless lack scholarly engagement with analysis. The article next attempts to excavate a set of implicit values, while making room for the possibility that the list of values put forward here is only incomplete, and that the list of values itself is the subject of potential debate, critique, or dissent, some of which may take the form of building infrastructures differently than the patterns laid out here. A first section outlines a set of “bibliographic” values; while the article’s second half turns to the power dynamics of infrastructure and a set of “critical ” values encompassed by particular projects, before turning to the issue of why understanding these values is so essential to understanding infrastructure projects as a form of scholarly production that merit support and recognition by the community at large.

The principles and case-studies here suggest that infrastructure represents a conscientious choice about the format for disseminating that argument that reflects critical thinking about the value of scholarship. In designing infrastructure, many scholars today are amplifying the values embedded in their scholarship – whether values of accessibility, of replicability, or even of the political critique of institutions – and that for this reason, infrastructure needs to be looked on as a particular kind of gesture, one that not merely critiques the world but attempts to actively remake it. The author’s personal history as a theorist/historian of infrastructure and sometime builder of infrastructure are offered by way of laying out the importance of the scholarly community engaging with the critical issues represented by a choice to build – and the hazards to professional careers that can occur when activities of this kind are undertheorized, underengaged, or otherwise underappreciated. Infrastructure thereby deserves to be elevated within a humanistic discourse that privileges action as well as contemplation.

Web portals that visualize data may strike many scholars as a strange place to begin a discussion of infrastructure. Visualizing data, of course, is but part from the whole, even as a physical mailbox is invisibly connected to a network of roads and trains, law and labor, standards and trust — so familiar that it too disappears into the background of landscape taken everywhere for granted — which allows letters posted in one continent to be delivered promptly to another quarter of the world within days. The colossus of infrastructure that has developed in university libraries and digital humanities centers to make possible the scraping, cleaning, and serving of data is the subject of a great deal of documentation, much of which takes the role of making visible otherwise invisible commitments of expense, labor, maintenance, and ideation.

As understood in its broadest form, infrastructure encompasses any use of technology or information which connects communities. Science and technology scholars such as Janet Vertesi have defined infrastructure in terms of a technology or management structure distinguished by its deliberate design, its scale, its capacity to deliver information, and, frequently, its invisibility [Vertesi and Ribers 2019, 263–4]. In the digital age, new infrastructures have rapidly transformed how ordinary citizens as well as scholars access information. Individuals read e-books, consult maps, and digest newspapers whose delivery depends upon a vast infrastructure system ranging from transoceanic cables to smart phones [Starosielski 2015] [Sawyer et al. 2019].

Meanwhile, scholarship too has grown to depend increasingly on a world of invisible technologies. Already in 2010, Geoffrey Rockwell described an “infrastructure turn” that was shaping how a majority of scholars accessed data [Rockwell 2010], which entailed new worlds of labor, storage, and expense for universities, much of which required new skills at managing digital data. Tara McPherson, founder and editor of a journal that provided one infrastructure for delivering digital projects to readers, described the creation of a “broader culture of experimentation and change” among faculty, particularly those with a specialty in visual analysis, as requiring new developments in infrastructure that would service, validate, and share faculty experiments – from accessible to journals tenure and review processes [McPherson 2010].

Indeed, a broad range of institutional players came into being at most universities and within many disciplines, including digital humanities centers, digital humanities majors, institutional repositories, and new guidelines for dissertation-writing and for the tenure and promotion of faculty [Gold 2018] [Clement et al. 2017] [Flanders and Hamlin 2013]. Libraries began to engage data storage, standards that define the data, the data itself, metadata, and applications that retrieve and serve the data, as well as hardware, software, and structures for the management of labor [Mattern 2014].

Researchers can turn to an emerging field of similarly interoperable tools that put quantitative analysis of texts within the grasp of textual scholars from any tradition in the humanities or social sciences. Among those tools are PhiloLogic,UChicago’s browser for topic-modeling text, analyzing word co-occurrence and re-use; InPho Topic Explorer, which allows users to apply topic modeling to their own body of text; Voyant, a simple web-interface which allows the user to pipe a selection of text through a variety of visualizations; Palladio, Stanford’s application for visualizing correspondence such as letters within a social network; CorTexT, Jean-Philippe Cointet’s extremely flexible and strong tool for language-based analysis on a body of text with temporal metadata; and Archives Unleashed, Ian Milligan’s toolbox for digital humanities and social sciences analysis of archives.

There are also, of course, individual repositories of texts that offer particular tools for a unique set of documents, especially JSTOR’s data for research portal, the online instance of the Old Bailey, as well as an expanding range of online portals for individual moments in time; those covered in this article include Slave Voyages, the Legacies of the British Slave-Ownership project, and Torn Apart/Separados, a project that documents the contemporary incarceration of immigrants and their families in the U.S. Effort will be made in this discussion to foreground the author’s personal experience of the successes and failures of the Paper Machines experiment, and the strengths of the infrastructure that supplanted it, towards a genealogy of the design principles appropriate to infrastructure in the humanities and social sciences.

Even more recently, Roopika Risam has argued for the existence of a postcolonial DH, marked by an “ethos of building,” where scholars create infrastructure to reconfigure access to suppressed voices that document the experience of colonization. She points to several examples of projects where scholars used infrastructure to reinterpret and challenge colonial world-making projects implicit in archives, by assembling alternative archives of information that supported research on the experience of colonized persons. Risam gives numerous examples that document the variety and importance of this work, including The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and the Online Tagore Variorum, which reassemble scattered texts documenting the experience of colonized persons, as well as Chicana por mi Raza, an archive of oral histories, ephemera, out-of-print publications that provide resources for Latina/o experience, and The Indigenous Digital Archive in New Mexico, which made available the records of Hope and Diné experience with boarding schools. Infrastructure in this case is at work reassembling the scattered voices of colonized persons, constructing alternative archives that challenge and actively provide alternatives to libraries whose holdings predominantly reflect the information matrix of the colonizer. In Risam’s eloquent phrase, “The archive uses technology to push back against dominant cultural representations of indigenous communities” [Risam 2019, 36].

Scholarly creation of infrastructure has become a primary realm of critical encounter with public narratives about culture, identity, and the past. Scholars who have engaged this space have forged an entirely new modality of scholarly publishing, one with tremendous power to shape public discourse. It is not clear, however, that all forms of infrastructure constitute a critical intervention in scholarship. The Internet Archive is a stalwart repository for preserving the historical artifacts, the creation of which surely constituted a political act in its time. Many of its sub-collections – for instance, troves of anthropological films collected by universities over decades — represent some work of critical scholarship. Nevertheless, it would be hard to argue that the Internet Archive’s little-curated collection of historical objects represents a scholarly intervention in any particular field. While not a scholarly piece of infrastructure by design, the Internet Archive’s voluminous collections of scanned books, archival videos, and recordings nevertheless consists of a “potential ”site of future critical interventions such as OCR, metadata, preservation, and collection analysis. Thus the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly infrastructure is not hard and fast.

In a critical review of existing digital humanities and social sciences projects, I have attempted to derive an overview of the values that motivated those projects via their expression in public-facing websites. The idea that a piece of infrastructure may encapsulate scholarly values is premised, in the first place, upon the implicit understanding that the designers of infrastructure have already made critical argumentation, embedded within the larger culture of critical thinking about technology and culture, and inspired by its insights. In other words, this article advances the proposition that the design of infrastructure, when it engages critically with existing thought about power, represents a form of scholarly argumentation.

In the following sections, this article will take the first step towards articulating some principles that define the culture of infrastructure. These principles are divided in two parts, reflecting the distance between the concepts of “scholarship” and “criticality” that I have teased apart in the introduction. A set of “bibliographic” principles of infrastructure describe the principles that bring data into alignment with traditional bibliophilic concerns about verifiability and fact in the liberal arts, including web tools that link directly back to particular manuscripts in particular archives. A set of “critical” principles of infrastructure describe the kind of interventions that render the invisible visible, and which otherwise mirror the kind of critical thinking called upon by Arendt and others as a liberatory intervention in the public sphere.

The principles advanced in this essay are merely a starting point – a review of possible sources, both from the traditional humanities and social sciences and from critical politics, which begins with an autobiographical narrative of the author’s own participation in the design and building of a piece of infrastructure. It is hoped that this starter list of principles will be amended and argued with, towards the creation of a more critical discourse about what humanistic infrastructure looks like and where critical thinking takes place, with the expected outcome of generating a scholarly discourse about the choices made in designing infrastructures for the public. An essay of this kind affords an opportunity to reflect on the public purposes and intellectual orientation intended in the building of infrastructure, and the extent to which humanities and social science critiques of the flow of information and power in society have resulted in the creation of alternative or transformative flows.

In enabling the researcher to efficiently identify the patterns that characterize a vast scale of documents, infrastructure can seed dozens or hundreds of scholarly arguments. The infrastructure thus represents a proto-argument, if not an argument or analysis itself.

What do I mean by proto-argument? An infrastructure contains constraints that structure and direct the format of the argument eventually produced over them, even as the shape of opera houses in London and Turin framed civic ambitions, structuring how later compositions, libretti, and performances would be received; those opera houses hosted hundreds or thousands of later productions.

In relationships of this kind, the architect’s work was often to envision and crystallize a set of intellectual values and ideological ambitions latent in opera. As historians of the opera have reasoned, the work of the architect was to offer a framework of imagination that included “civic ambition,” “unabashed commercialism,” and “international cosmopolitanism,” which ran in parallel to textual forms of argument-making about history, civic identity, and teleology [Aspden 2019, 6]. Indeed, the opera house structured the reception of operas within a “penumbra of exclusivity” that mirrored the social structuring of other forms of enlightenment knowledge [Aspden 2019].

Hence the “proto” in proto-argument. The architect’s work codified enlightenment values into a structure that would both enhance later performances, extend the potential of the. The creation of the vessel represents the moment in time when an ideology is crystallized into a form where it can be replicated. Much of the work of conceptualizing what Aida — as an epic about the tragedy of gender, race, and empire — might be was thus the work of a generation of architects and opera-designers who worked previous to Verdi’s masterpiece. Similarly, the infrastructure allows the application of one theory of text or temporality to a million data sets.

Architecture and infrastructure both function simultaneously as creation, vessel, and constraint. They are proto-arguments in the sense that they structure the natural course of use, exchange, and argumentation that follows from an original design. One cannot stage a Brechtian play in an opera house. In a state of disaffection, one might imagine dissolving the fourth wall from the opera house at Turin, but one would have to build a totally different kind of theater in order to realize it.

Similarly, scholarly infrastructures that curate particular choices of word analysis – grammar, topic, bag-of-words; transparent or not, open to interpretation or not – package an entire system of understanding about what a text is, what components of grammatical and semiotic structure or historical context matter, and who is allowed to participate in the interpretation of text. Scholarly infrastructure can be designed in such a way as to elucidate the critical function of scholarship or to diminish it; and to expand public access to polysemous interpretations or battles over the historical record or to channel them. All of those choices have enormous downstream implications for what scholarship can be executed, published, or received.

Builder-scholars, over the last decade, have made legion critical decisions that open up corpora to possible kinds of engagement. Google Ngrams does not allow the scholar to inquire about word co-location as PhiloLogic does; Cortext allows the user to highlight discontinuities in time in a way that few other resources do; each innovation in analysis represents an opening to a critical question, informed by concerns in linguistics or history, bringing the theories of disciplines into alignment with algorithms and corpus in such a way as to scale theory into an analysis with new documents.

Builder-scholars are also, as I shall argue below, responsible for making choices that govern who has the opportunity to inspect, to use, or to interpret data, thus structuring entire communities of knowledge. The builder’s decisions – to model gender or not, to open the structure, to an enormous degree, whether and how fluidly later scholars who use the infrastructure will be able to compare the use of gender, race, or class in the text; whether hours, days, years, or decades of change over time are susceptible to analysis; and who is allowed to make that analysis – whether a scholarly elite or anyone at all.

To embrace this perspective made atop a web portal is to highlight the hybridity of labor in discoveries, where both the design of infrastructure and the scholarly analysis built upon those discoveries are crucial. When an award-winning paper is published that relies on the metrics of gender difference encoded in historical data made available by a public-facing portal, is the award properly given to the paper’s author, or to the website’s designer, who identified gender difference as a key component of that data, fit the data with the correct algorithm for analysis, and made the results available? Arguably, the award would properly be given to both: not only because the paper would be impossible without the labor of the data, but also because a large portion of the critical perspective implicit in the paper was given in advance by the infrastructure.

Above all, this line of reasoning underscores that the design and building of portals is itself an act of imagination, and possible critique. In the following section, I will propose some general lines of reasoning about what kinds of imagination and critique the present generations of portals embody.

In the foregoing sections, I have surveyed a range of possible values expressed by the builders of scholarly infrastructure. A proposition of this kind is important because the intellectual engagement of infrastructure-builders with critical thought has not always been self-evident to outsiders.

Understanding value as a factor in the kind of work embodied by scholarly infrastructure projects – including the bibliographic, critical, political values represented by engaging in project-building as opposed to traditional scholarly documentation in the form of books and articles – is crucial to having those projects accepted and interpreted as interventions in the realm of scholarship, where critical commentary routinely engages the kind of intellectual values represented by a project and the way that data, visualizations, and other forms of labor support those values. Understanding the range of possible values underlying those commitments is therefore crucial, as communities and scholars come to terms with the stake of committing energy to infrastructure-building rather than to traditional scholarship products such as grants and articles.

The metaphors that I have offered above – comparing scholarly infrastructure to an opera house – are also productive in a number of directions that cannot be exhausted in the course of this article, especially involving the question of where labor or ideological contributions occur. Panning out from the opera and opera-house itself, one can see any given production of Aida is itself the product of architect, composer and librettist, conductor, and cast. A reader-centric interpretation even pushes this list to include the audience in the theater on any given night, and their manifold interpretations of the opera [Locke 2006].

Just so, the work of digital production and interpretation includes all of those forms of invisible infrastructure that include scanning and cleaning texts, storing and serving them, before the design of the infrastructure; the infrastructure itself, any scholarly articles whose interpretive approach depends on the infrastructure in question, and any individual users of the infrastructure, whether or not they later become authors of analyses published in traditional academic venues.

The multiple locations of labor and interpretation in such a process constellate a broader transition to a hermeneutic regime of information at scale. Elsewhere, I have argued that shifts of this kind are marked by a deferment of “critical thinking”, where insight is produced at a single point of interpretation and argumentation with the text, into a processes of “critical search”, where critical engagement is required over the entire length of an information pipeline [Guldi 2018a].

Appreciation for the values implicit in scholarly infrastructure has not always been the tone by which digital scholarship is received by larger communities in the university. In one inflammatory editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a scholar characterized the digital humanities as being the tool of the neoliberal takeover of the university and an ally in the adjunctification of the professoriate [Brennan 2017]. In at least one tenure process with which the author is familiar, a department threatened to stage a kind of inquisitorial panel to monitor a digital humanist already published in traditional books and articles, because engagement with digital humanities and social sciences question – including building infrastructure – was understood as somehow sullying the life of the mind with the dirty matter of service.[1]

The remedy for this failure is debate and conversation that theorizes what it is that people do when they build infrastructure, and at what stages scholarly discourse, humanistic discourse, technological acumen, dissent, and political thought enter the process. Scholars who think critically about infrastructure must advertise their critical engagement in the form of a scholarly essay that reflects on the format of the infrastructure adopted and its implications.

In teasing apart the range of values represented by modern infrastructure, I have argued that infrastructure building implies, at minimum, a commitment on the part of the scholar to scale and a relinquishing of control, which imply a choice of values, including a set of “traditional” values, such as transparency with regards to document base and the knowledge of society, which are aligned with long-standing commitments in the humanities and social sciences, and “critical” values, such as participation and the critique of power, which are aligned with radical traditions in the academy and beyond.

Recognizing the choice values at stake in building infrastructure is essential, I believe, to understanding much of the work in the digital humanities and social sciences as well as other parts of the university today: there is something on offer that has not been illuminated in the voluminous literature on infrastructure, digital humanities, or the crisis of the humanities, which deserves to be recognized, praised, critiqued, and pressed, because it presents a challenge to contemporary practices of scholarship, and scholarly communities must decide whether that challenge is worth embracing.

On the surface, infrastructure represents a different species of animal from the scholarly article, whether single-authored or authored by many individuals. In some cases, like Andrew Goldstone’s Topic Viewer, they are the creation of a single individual, but the individual’s responsibilities include using code to who cobble together existing packages for data cleaning, analysis, and visualization, as well as scholarly insight about the kinds of cleaning, analysis, and visualization likely to produce insight from texts of a particular type. These designs thus resemble scholarly articles or narratives in that they provide users with an orientation to the data, based on wide experience; but they also resemble cartography or traditional kinds of data analysis in that they entail working with vast amounts of evidence to produce visualizations useful to different parties for different reasons. As a monument of scholarly labor and insight, the building of infrastructure typically represents a major scholarly intervention – entailing more labor than that included in the typical journal article in the humanities or social sciences. It bears the weight of a book.

In many cases, the committees that assign credit to academics for publishing books and articles resist crediting the development of software with the same power on the basis of the plurality of labor represented by the creation of an infrastructural project. Infrastructure often represents the product of collaborations, where “labs” of scholars and students, or hybrids of scholars working with university staff and/or private contractors, produce the design for the project and its execution. It can, after all, be difficult to isolate the contribution of a single party working on a project [Edmond 2015]. Typically, in these collaborative labs, coders and scholars collaborate to design a visual and interpretive strategy that governs how users interact with the data. The end product reflects ongoing collaborations, much as an edited book may be conceived of and rallied by a single scholar but may represent the work of many hands.

In some of the most highly-developed web portals that serve humanists, the infrastructure requires ongoing updates managed by graduate students, salaried coders, full-time staff, and administrators, whose tasks may range from insuring interoperability with users’ machines to managing lawsuits (for instance in the famous case in which Thomson-Reuters sued Zotero. In any case, the range of labor provided – from coding and design to data collection, cleaning, analysis, and more – is more diverse than the traditional scholarly processes of archival research, analysis, and writing, even where facaulty act mainly in an administrative or visionary role rather than producing code themselves. Overseeing the development of infrastructurerequires the scholars involved to conceive of their arguments in visual terms, and to produce multiple visualizations that align with different perspectives on the data in question.

Yet the plurality of labor necessary to realize infrastructure is only part of the story of why the university community is sometimes hostile towards infrastructure projects. A turn towards personal autobiography will be useful here. As a scholar of the history of infrastructure who researched eighteenth-century road building and wayfinding through traditional archival means, I came to the digital humanities primarily as a researcher interested in how keyword search was changing my own techniques of research. Initially, I resisted the idea of building infrastructure, preferring to think of myself exclusively as an author of books and articles and a consumer of tools developed by others.

The flowering of new tools in the digital humanities – the “infrastructure turn” identified by Geoffrey Rockwell (2010) — persuaded me that scholars with active the gap between existing tools for annotation, curation, and story-telling – such as Zotero and Omeka – and the array of text-mining and visualization practices coming into being from computer science. Some of those projects were created by affiliates of research universities such as George Mason, which had a firm commitment to building infrastructure, and whose graduates were distinguished by their knowledge of servers and code. Others were the work of senior faculty, who had already built a career composed of multiple books, who turned to building infrastructure at an advanced stage in their career when they could command a multi-year research project to build an infrastructure around an infrastructure of particular interest to themselves and their students. Admiration for those accomplishments made me question archival research as the sole expression of scholarly research and argumentation, and opened the door for my curiosity about infrastructure-building.

In 2010, I began writing grants and talking to colleagues about the possibility of building an infrastructure for the digital humanities and social sciences. I imagined that building a tool that would distill scholarly knowledge into frequently-repeated patterns, extending the scholar’s power of recognizing patterns over tens of thousands or millions of documents, and thus acting as a kind of scholarly prosthesis. Working in research-focused departments nevertheless forced me to reconcile my admiration for scholarly infrastructure with my own needs, as well as the needs of my students and colleagues – all of us, of course, being researchers at first-tier research programs, who were incentivized above all to discover new outlooks on the past, whether from archivally-new materials or from a new perspective on events already known but insufficiently understood. It was hard to imagine a single tool that would serve this purpose. The graduate students who I worked with at Chicago had extremely diverse research backgrounds and interests – ranging from early-modern Germany, to modern Latin America and nineteenth-century Chicago. The tool that would serve my research-focused students would necessarily need to work with documents of concern to them all, using existing language-processing algorithms and visualizations to offer insight into documents of different kinds. Thus it was important to build a tool that would allow researchers invested in text from a range of backgrounds to profit from the tools of word-count analysis and topic modeling then being used by a handful of scholars in the digital humanities.

Many examples mark how senior scholars skeptical of digital methods have held up the career of junior scholars — even those who have otherwise fulfilled traditional requirements for tenure — and this certainly seems to be the case for builders of infrastructure. Such affairs undermine the progress of the field, as one anecdote will illustrate. Consider the case of a scholar, known to me, whose interest in digital methods had led her — after finishing a traditional monograph in her field — to build a piece of digital infrastructure also publish a treatise investigating the future of her field with respect to the digital humanities When she did so, she was punished by her department.

The grounds for tenure laid out at her hiring were reversed; she was ordered to write a third book on a traditional, archival topic that was ordained by her committee, and it was conveyed to her that the department was outright hostile to her continued use of digital methods. Far from recognizing the value of a piece of infrastructure developed by a junior scholar, her department counted infrastructure as an albatross for her career.

In the vita that she had submitted to her committee for tenure, this scholar could count several accomplishments unusual for historians, including the aforementioned infrastructure, as well as a significant grant. Following the advice of colleagues in other departments, this scholar circulated a draft in which the infrastructure and grant-related projects were classified under a heading of “book weight projects”. Her committee recommended that she remove the infrastructure project to a section on “miscellaneous projects”. The message to her was clear: infrastructure would not be valued alongside books and articles as a marker of scholarly labor, intellectual value, or theory-driven critique. The double-binds that this individual faced – resistance to the digital humanities, resistance to infrastructure-building, and few incentives to document the critical thinking behind existing infrastructure experimentation — amounted to an incentive for delay. She delayed writing further about infrastructure, in part, because the culture of resistance she faced meant that even this kind of scholarly commentary on experimentation would itself be rendered suspect by tenure review committees by the same hostility that the article needed to challenge.

Things might have gone otherwise for the individual and infrastructure in question, of course, had there been intellectual apparatus that considered the development of infrastructure as a form of scholarship, infused with the values of critique: her investments of time might have been viewed as a viable form of scholarship and a valuable investment in future forms of scholarly community, rather than a dangerous action inappropriate for junior faculty. The problem was essentially that investments in scholarly infrastructure were obscure from the point-of-view of existing scholarly institutions; they could be seen neither as a form of scholarly argumentation, nor as a critical reflection on contemporary scholarly practice. In order for that resistance to give way, scholars would need to document the history, debate, and values out of which new experiments with infrastructure were emerging.

Institutional resistance to a culture of experimentation, however, is a wicked problem, in that no one solution is sufficient to overcome it: a single major publication is rarely sufficient to shift a culture. In my own career, I began to develop such a justification for scholarly infrastructure projects in my second book, The History Manifesto, which set forward the promise of tools like topic modeling for opening up longue-durée analysis of problems to historical analysis.

Failure to recognize or support infrastructure as a scholarly achievement has consequences. Today, the infrastructure in the story is no longer maintained — a fact that highlights the differentials of commitment between senior faculty and junior faculty. As with the train system in the Parisian suburbs, junior faculty projects unprotected by senior administrators are liable to be refused maintenance and so degrade. I delayed writing explicitly about infrastructure as scholarly production and intellectual critique. Very few articles reflect on the process of building or state a case for the role of argumentation and thought in infrastructure design; there was very little, in 2013 and 2014, to point to by way of a firmly-established “infrastructure turn” that would be acceptable to senior historians. Indeed, at 2019, this essay offers a much-delayed assessment of the role of critical thinking in the design of Paper Machines in 2009-13.

The double-binds that I faced in 2014 — resistance to the digital humanities, resistance to infrastructure-building, and few incentives to document the critical thinking behind existing infrastructure experimentation — amounted to an incentive for delay. After initial hostility to the broad-brushstrokes with which we praised the potential of the digital humanities in the Manifesto, I delayed writing further about infrastructure, in part, because the culture of resistance I faced meant that even this kind of scholarly commentary on experimentation would itself be rendered suspect in tenure review committees by the same hostility that the article needed to challenge.

We might refer to a culture that resists innovation, because the terms that inspire innovation are obscure and hostility is rife, as a “culture of delay”.

My own partial and much-delayed engagement with these problems may be symptomatic of larger failures of acknowledgement for the builders of scholarly infrastructure, as well as our own hesitance to explain our values. Scholars who have come to make major investments of time and energy in building infrastructure rarely justify those projects in scholarly or public venues, perhaps because the intellectual labor behind the work or the time dedicated to infrastructure projects is likely to be dismissed, and the labor judged with hostility. The failure of institutions to recognize or reward scholarly infrastructure compounds almost certainly compounds scholars’ slowness to highlight the intellectual values or merit expressed by their infrastructure building projects.

I therefore propose that the remedy for culture of delay is, ironically, more theory: theory in the service of illuminating the alignments that compel some scholars to experiment with building and sharing infrastructure at scale. The builders of infrastructure need to theorize openly about the choices they have made and the values that those choices represent. The foregoing principles have been offered for the sake of waymarking out some broad and familiar territory, but future theorists of scholarly infrastructure will necessarily have to take up the challenge of setting up their own waymarkers, or arguing with and thus refining the extremely preliminary terms in which I have framed values such as “community ownership” or “transparency”. In that process of scholarly debate, a trail of references will be created that will familiarize critical thinking about infrastructure for mainstream communities of scholars.

What sort of work, then, is the labor that goes into a humanistic web site? This article has already suggested that the principles governing that academic labor reflect not only bibliographic and scholarly traditions, but also discourse from critical theory about the liberatory potential of knowledge and participatory research. A strong argument has thus just been made for infrastructure-building, in the humanities, as a site of intellectual argumentation, so long as the process of designing and building the infrastructure entails some moment of reflection upon the principles that governed its design and their inspiration (which need not, of course, replicate the principles outlined here).

Clear though the argument may be for critical reflections on infrastructure as a form of scholarly argument, some account must be given of why so little critical discourse exists on the building of digital humanities projects of this kind.

This article has proposed nine criteria of critical thinking about infrastructure demonstrated in mainstream projects which demonstrate an engagement by the designers with ideas about the humanities. Two of those criteria – those I have labeled “critical principles” – demonstrate that scholarly infrastructure embodies political and argumentative work prized by some scholars, for example, those concerned with the defense of democracy, or the radicalization of community access to knowledge. Projects that demonstrate these criteria show that the designers have actively prepared the infrastructure so as to engage with the concerns of their discipline, and building, under these concerns, represents an act of engaged criticism and argument. Many of what I have called the “bibliographic principles” also demonstrate an engagement with critical thinking, and also with the political insights of social theory, in the form of an engagement with infrastructure as a tool of power. Infrastructure projects that demonstrate these both criteria suggest that practitioners have not only engaged with the concerns of their discipline, but with the critical theory of the last half-century as well, particularly as translated through the social/historical infrastructure turn and its critique of the infrastructure of knowledge-making.

In other words, the realization of the critical principles in acts of scholarly development demonstrate that a wide variety of infrastructure-builders are actively engaging a wide-ranging critique of the institutions of knowledge and their political power. Here, scholarly engagement and argumentation are taken to an extreme largely unknown in the traditional disciplines. A double infrastructure turn – combining social insight and technological building – is at work, which merits the inspection of scholars across the academy. Infrastructure building is the present-day site of engagement with the insights about power and governmentality that defined the scholarly infrastructure turn.

The author wishes to thank Colin Allen and the anonymous reviewer from DHQ for their insightful engagement and generous reactions, as well as the editors and other contributors to the special issue.