The circulation of information cosmopolitics starts with users’ perplexity while encountering new information objects, which can be any object (human or nonhuman) that can carry information. Information objects are frequently placed in institutions such as libraries, archives, museums, and distributed through different media such as print, videos, and the Internet. But we often deal with them in our everyday life. For example, a speed bump on a street is an information object with an inscribed message from a police department which asks drivers to slow down [Latour 1987]. In-scription is a process when an entity “becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace”  [Latour 1999b, 306]. An information object is thus anything that leaves a trace, which could be retraced, translated, de-scribed. Such a trace often leaves an actor in a state of perplexity: Where has the trace come from? How can it be retraced? Can I translate it to my language? Is it relevant to me? How can I de-scribe this in-scription? This kind of perplexity is the starting point of information cosmopolitics. While information objects are in-scribed with implicit propositions for a generic individual, a specific individual has to translate the implicit propositions into explicitly relevant information in order to navigate the situation. Therefore, for a generic body to become a fully individualised actor dealing with a specific situation, a proposition in-scribed into an information object has to be de-scribed.

Information is always transformation, a de-scription of information object. In order for inscription to be informing, actors need to translate information objects in their own terms. Actors approve or reject propositions in-scribed into information objects. They individualise collective propositions according to their own methodology, making them relevant or not. This individualisation transforms a user from a generic body to an actor. This is why the existence of a collective, an institution, or a cosmos is in the hand of local users [Latour 1987] – in the hand of local representations, as there is no reality without representation [Latour 2004b, 127]. In order to illustrate that individuals are neither in control, nor out of control, Latour uses the web term plug-in as a conceptual tool. He intentionally uses a web metaphor to illustrate that individuals can download a plug-in from an institution, which will provide them with a temporary competence for a specific situation [Latour 2005]. By downloading some cultural clichés, individuals are provided with competencies to create an opinion of a book, to have a political stance, or to know to which group they pertain. Someone is an individual only if she or he has been individualised by downloading these “individualizers” from the outside. However, the outside is not a global context which determines the inside, but it is another local place to which an actor can be plugged-in. Plug-ins do not have the power to determine, they can simply make someone do something, and making do is not the same as causing, dominating, or limiting. De-scription is thus a process of "trans-forming" rather than “in-forming” an actor [Latour and Hermant 1998]. Rather than seeing actors as limited to their own description, their social or cognitive representation of the external world, information cosmopolitics approaches de-scription of an in-scription as rebuilding the cosmos. Through this transformation, an actor attributes to another actor “identity, interests, a role to play, a course of action to follow, and projects to carry out”  [Callon 1986b, 24]. Such an approach enables us to see information processes as a result of complex negotiations, since “transfers of information never occur except through subtle and multiple transformations”  [Latour 1999b, 298]. Actors change the role from intermediaries, simply transporting information, to mediators, that is “actors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it”  [Latour 1993, 81]. They change from intermediaries that are shaped by heavy layers of context to mediators that shape the context, and “information changes from brick to clay, moved and shaped in unique ways by each perceiver”  [Dervin 1983, 169]. However, meaning needs to be legitimised by others, so de-scriptions have to be put in a “big picture” to become comparable with the existing standards. Individual propositions have to be contextualised to become relevant for others.

Contextualisation provides a common language for heterogeneous entities. Nothing links humans, non-humans, different domains of interests, different times and spaces, like a context. Linked by a common context, each of these entities depends on each other. They become combinable and commensurable. However, actors are not placed into this context, but attached to it. The context and its significance is created by actors. Individual interpretations are put in “big picture” in attempt to become significant for others. This frequently creates new information needs or changes priority of existing information needs, effecting circulation in consequent cycles. As the configuration of plug-ins is slightly changed by this prioritising, the individual identity is slightly changing too; thus the information is not de-scribed by the exactly the same individual, nor it is contextualised into exactly the same context, in every subsequent cycle. Therefore, the moment of contextualisation could be a departure point for all kinds of “serendipity” [Pettigrew 1999], and as such it is perhaps the most creative moment in the circulation providing the maximum possible combinations of propositions. Contextualisation allows “the maximisation of disputability”  [Latour 2004a] so that a cosmos is not prematurely simplified into an agreement. Information cosmopolitics is not an attempt to put miraculously everyone in agreement [Stengers 2005]. It is neither about equality of actors, but it is about making them all “to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible, that preludes any shortcut or simplification, any differentiation a priori between that which counts and that which does not”  [Stengers 2005, 1003]. Contextualisation thus provides a space for a due process before decision of inclusion and exclusion. It provides actors to be commensurable by attaching them to the same context, before some information is excluded and other standardised.

Standardisation is a process through which information is articulated into a collective proposition. Provisional closure to the initial perplexity is provided by assigning an essence to the information through negotiations. What was an object of perplexity becomes the object of an agreement. Some information are standardised, some are excluded during these processes that produce the inside and the outside of the circulation through which a collective – a cosmos – is provided with a shape, size, and collective identity, represented through collective propositions. Once the propositions are standardised, the actors “no longer question their legitimate presence at the heart of collective life”  [Latour 2004b, 109]. This move from context to standards is a move from a generic to a specific collective, a move from flexibility to certainty. While contextualisation provides diversity that enables commensurability, standardisation enables a hierarchy that provides unity. However, collective propositions can only gain stability in a constant circulation. In fact, they are recreated and translated in every single cycle of information cosmopolitics. While a dramatic change is always possible with a sudden introduction of an external in-scription, most changes are subtle but regular. Each cycle of the circulation is a new trial of credibility of a collective proposition. It is important to note that such circulation of negotiation does not produce statements but propositions. To paraphrase Latour, there is a great difference between talking about information practices “if one uses propositions (which are articulate or inarticulate) instead of statements (which are true or false)”  [Latour 2004b, 206]. The difference could not be sharper as statements refer to accuracy, and propositions are the result of articulation. While a quest for accuracy ignores negotiations, and as such paralyses circulation of information cosmopolitics, articulation is almost a synonym for cosmopolitics in which heterogeneous entities exchange properties in a constant negotiation. As such, collective propositions provide a local, thus manageable, totality, which in turn provides a closure for initial perplexity.

However, such a closure is always provisional as through a new inscription new perplexity is invited. Figure 1 of the model does not illustrate the full integration of information into collective proposition, but rather only one cycle of this slow transformation. Each new piece of information goes through this process. If it is excluded before it is articulated into a proposition, it can still be in-scribed later when a new configuration of circulation is more favourable. Any excluded information is a new possibility in a new cycle, and every accepted proposition is regularly re-inscribed in a new information object in order to be as durable as possible. What was insignificant information in one cycle can be crucial information in another one. Information is not itself significant or insignificant, but it gains significant position in the circulation. It is translated in every moment of the circulation of information cosmopolitics. However, these transformations are not abrupt modifications but rather subtle changes, limited by the boundaries of the network. Actors could de-scribe an in-scription only within the limits of the in-scription and availability of plug-ins used for de-scription. Contextualisation is limited by already established standards in the network, and durability of propositions is dependent on the immutability and mobility of in-scriptions. As subtle as they are, these transformations still slightly modify the configuration of associations within the circulation. As a result, a new cycle brings a need for new plug-ins, which slightly changes individual identities, new priorities are created that slightly change context, and standards are slightly changed creating a need for new in-scriptions. All this creates new information needs and new perplexity, which feed the constant circulation of information cosmopolitics.

By shifting the focus from individual mind and social context to this circulation, Information Cosmopolitics provides an alternative to the existing IB models. Knowledge is not seen as cognitive or social, but as distributed. The model suggests that individual and social are provisional effects of individualisation and collectivisation, and as such they cannot be used to explain information practices. Both individual and collective are merely moments of information cosmopolitics, connected by scripts that circulate between them. In one moment, the collective is scripted by the individual, only to script the individual next moment. These sequential events of exchanging properties between individual and collective is what keeps the circulation of information cosmopolitics, and what enables both diversity of individual associations and their unification into a common world — a cosmos, constantly redefined by the circulation. Following these events may illuminate how users translate information to be relevant to their interests, how they contextualise their individual propositions to evaluate them in order to be accepted by a collective, how the collective propositions are re-inscribed into information objects, and how the new digital inscription creates a new perplexity that triggers a new cycle of information practices.

An adopted cycle of Information Cosmopolitics model and stages of the Flexible Project Management framework are combined into a hybrid model for managing DH projects. The model proposes that the lifecycle of a DH project consists of a constant circulation of information cosmopolitics, in which an iteration starts with a perplexity and ends with a provisional closure, in-scribed into a work outcome. A progressive flow of a DH project is adopted from the Flexible Project Management framework, which identifies five steps in an agile project: Visionate, Speculate, Innovate, Reevaluate, and Disseminate. As the processes of evaluation are already incorporated within the circulation of information cosmopolitics, the proposed model defines the lifecycle of a DH project to be a progressive flow in four stages:

The process of evaluation is considered as a constant activity rather than a stage in the project lifecycle. The individual evaluation refers to de-scription process in information cosmopolitics cycle, while a collective evaluation is related to the standardisation process. The four progressive stages are defined by progressive work outcomes, conducted in four progressive work contexts: visionate-context, speculate-context, innovate-context, and disseminate-context. The visionate-stage results in the project vision; the speculate-stage in the project plan; the innovate-stage results in a prototype; while a deliverable is a work outcome of disseminate-stage. Figure 2 illustrates the lifecycle of a DH project, according to the hybrid model.

Each cycle starts with encountering a work outcome by a team member. First, the team members de-scribe an existing work outcome (vision, plan, prototype, or deliverable), according to their own interests and relevance criteria, which results in their individual propositions. In order to make an individual proposition relevant to other actors in the project, a team member has to place this proposition in a work context, corresponding to the four work stages of the project. Work contexts include the work on visioning, speculating, innovating, and disseminating. Once the individual proposition is in a particular context, it becomes commensurable with other propositions within the project. As such, the individual proposition is a subject to standardisation, that is a collective evaluation. Some propositions are accepted and some are rejected during this process. The accepted propositions are transformed into collective propositions, and they are finally in-scribed into a work outcome, normally into a work outcome corresponding to the context to which the proposition has been attached in the current cycle.

In a linear progressive flow, this circulation through a context and its corresponding work outcome is repeated as long as a milestone is not reached. A milestone refers to in-scription of the final collective proposition within a context, which allows the project to move to the next context. It means that when the final collective proposition within the visionate-context is in-scribed into the project vision document, a milestone is reached, which enables the project to move to the speculate-context. Reaching the milestone within the speculate-context will move the project to innovate-context, while a milestone within innovate-context will enable dissemination of a deliverable. However, the progress of a project is not necessary a linear process. For example, collective evaluation of an individual proposition attached to the innovate-context can result in reconsidering the project plan, or even the project vision, which may require a complex negotiation within the project. The more a proposition deviates from the linear flow of the project, the more difficult is to in-scribe it into a project outcome. And a deviation from a linear progressive flow of a DH project can occur at any moment, as we will see in the following discussion of stages in the project lifecycle.