Part of the "Introduction to Research Infrastructures" module, available at http://training.parthenos-project.eu/

1. Infrastructures
ESU Leipzig, 2016
Dr Jennifer Edmond
Trinity College Dublin

2. “facilities, resources or services of a unique nature that have
been identified by pan-European research communities to
conduct top-level activities in all fields. This definition of
Research Infrastructures, including the associated human
resources, covers major equipment or sets of instruments, as
well as knowledge-containing resources such as collections,
archives and databases. Research Infrastructures may be
“single-sited”, “distributed”, or “virtual” (the service being
provided electronically). They often require structured
information systems related to data management, enabling
information and communication. These include technology-
based infrastructures such as grid, computing, software and
middleware.”
European Roadmap for Research infrastructures (1st ed., p.
16). (2006). Luxembourg

3. “Morphologically, digital infrastructures
can be defined as shared, unbounded,
heterogeneous, open, and evolving
sociotechnical systems comprising an
installed base of diverse information
technology capabilities and their user,
operations, and design communities”
Tilson, D., Lyytinen, K., & Sørensen, C. (2010). Research
commentary - digital infrastructures: the missing IS research
agenda. Information Systems Research, 21(4), 748-759.

4. Infrastructure gets ‘below the level of the
work,’ “i.e. without specifying exactly how
work is to be done or exactly how information
is to be processed. Most systems that attempt
to force conformity to a particular conception
of a work process (e.g. Lotus Notes) have
failed to achieve infrastructural status because
they violate this principle. By contrast, email
has become fully infrastructural because it can
be used for virtually any work task.”
P. Edwards, S. Jackson, G Bowker and C Knobel, Understanding
Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions and Design (2007)

5. “the term cyberinfrastructure is meant to denote the layer of
information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services
that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry but
developed for specific scholarly purposes: cyberinfrastructure
is something more specific than the network itself, but it is
something more general than a tool or a resource developed
for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more
broadly, for a particular discipline. So, for example, digital
history collections and the collaborative environments in
which to explore and analyze them from multiple disciplinary
perspectives might be considered cyberinfrastructure,
whereas fiber-optic cables and storage area networks or basic
communication protocols would fall below the line for
cyberinfrastructure”
John Unsworth, Our Cultural Commonwealth

6. “Infrastructures meditate. They are the structures ‘in
between’that allow things people and signs to travel across
space by means of more or less standardised paths and more
or less standard protocols for converstion or translation.
Thinking of infrastructures as mediating interfaces, that is as
points of interaction and translation on material, institutional
and discurive levels allows us to get to the heart of the
dynamics we seek to capture.”
Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the
Project of Europe, edited by A. Badenoch, A. Fickers

7. “In its widest sense, infrastructure allows
us as finite individuals to achieve beyond
our individual capacity to know, to do, to
see.”
Jennifer Edmond, IJHAC 2013

8. ” Research infrastructures are complex
agglomerations of knowledge, data, people,
and services that bring together diverse
resources for a wide user base and make these
resources (re)usable and available for an
appropriately long term in order to support
research (either individual or collaborative)
and share the results of that research.”
PARTHENOS Project

9. But are they infrastructures…
1. Voyant, http://voyant-tools.org/
2. Bamboo DiRT, http://dirtdirectory.org/
3. CLARIN, https://www.clarin.eu/
4. EHRI, http://www.ehri-project.eu/
5. MiTH, http://mith.umd.edu/
6. Europeana, http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
7. Hathi Trust, https://www.hathitrust.org/
(see also https://www.hathitrust.org/htrc)
8. NINES, http://www.nines.org/
9. Trinity Library Digital Collections,
http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/
10. Hypothese/Episciences/Hal,
https://www.episciences.org/, http://en.hypotheses.org/
11. Your own institution

10. Project?Tool?
Teaching
or
Public?
??

11. Other?
Project?Tool?
Teaching
or
Public?
??
Scale and Complexity
Diverse users
Diverse resources
Diverse methods
Multiple research phases
(Data to Knowledge:
Federate, integrate,
assimilate, communicate)
Standards,
Data lifecycle,
Persistent Identifiers,
IPR and Licensing
Connected and Connecting
‘Evolving and Involving’
Open (source, data, culture, api)
Available, Interoperable and
Sustainable
Support for research methods and
communications
Granularity and type of data,
knowledge
Baseline of expertise expected
Infrastructural Practices

12. Networks and
Communities
Knowledge
and Publications
Research Data
Collections
Software, Tools and
Services
Other?
Bricks
and
Mortar
Infrastructural Assets

13. Networks and
Communities
Knowledge
and Publications
Research Data
Collections
Software, Tools and
Services
Other?
Bricks
and
Mortar
Research
Centre
Technical
Infrastructure
Knowledge
Infrastructure
Research
Infrastructure
Standards
Organisation