Author: Jeri Wieringa

Infrastructures are installations and services that function as “mediating interfaces” or “structures ‘in between’ that allow things, people and signs to travel across space by means of more or less standardized paths and protocols for conversion or translation.”1 A digital research infrastructure is no different: it’s a mediating set of technologies for research and resource discovery, collaboration, sharing and dissemination of scientific output.

Infrastructures, however, are also strong cultural and political symbols
From electricity systems in the 1920s, to coal trains in the 1950s, through to the gateways and bridges on Euro notes in the present decade, infrastructures have been mobilized repeatedly in broader spheres as symbols and metaphors for broader forms of modernization, integration and co-operation. (Badenoch and Fickers, 2)

A few months ago, Science published a Thanksgiving article on what scientists can be grateful for. It’s got a lot of good points, like being thankful for family members who accept the crazy hours we work, or for those really useful research projects that make science cool enough for us to get funding for the merely really interesting. It does have one unfortunate reference to humanists:

Editors’ Note: The following talks, panel websites, blog posts, and public documents all came from the 2012 meetings of the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association and associated THATCamp the past weekend. *updated 1/26/12*

OPINION: Discovering fun facts by graphing terms found among the 5 million volumes of the Google Books project sure is amusing — but this pursuit dubbed ‘culturomics’ is not the same as being an historian.

Earlier this year, a group of scientists — mostly in mathematics and evolutionary psychology — published an article in Science titled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” The authors’ technique, called “culturomics,” would, they said, “extend the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.” The authors employed a “corpus” of more than 5 million books — 500 billion words — that have been scanned by Google as part of the Google Books project.