Recently, several collaborators and I submitted a chapter proposal in response to a call for submission to a volume on critical infrastructure studies and digital humanities. The editors did not accept our proposal. They cited the high number of submissions and the “word limit” specified by the university press contracted for the volume as the reason. In this talk, I like to reflect on how networked possibilities (the multimodal forms of scholarly artifacts and modes of engagements) are still being dictated by the properties of print and it’s associated academic capital. In the meantime, much of the critical infrastructures necessary for networked open scholarship are increasingly being designed and controlled by a small handful of multinational corporate publishers turned data analytics cartel. The creation of end-to-end knowledge production and evaluation platform and its inscribed logic of data extraction has enormous implications for our aspirations for open scholarship, particularly for early career scholars. We may still be focused on infrastructures as the object of study, but we should be more concerned with how infrastructures govern our labour and scholarly practices and, above all, our autonomy. The talk will provide suggestions on how best to design community governance over infrastructure, instead of being governed by infrastructures not by our design.

1. critical infrastructure studies
2. digital humanities
3. infrastructure
4. knowledge production

This talk was delivered virtually on June 7, 2022, as an Institute Lecture as part of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada). The session was chaired by Sarah Severson (University of Alberta).