A National Science Foundation Workshop
Academic scientists and funding agencies throughout the advanced industrialized world have recently embarked on a major effort to imagine, develop, and build new cyberinfrastructures. Separately, for several decades historians, social scientists, and infrastructural practitioners have been studying the development of railroads, waterworks, highways, telephony, business communication systems, and the Internet, along with ‘second-order’ infrastructures such as the world weather data network. This NSF-sponsored workshop will bring together these two communities, allowing participants to address an important question: What practical lessons can the history, sociology, and experience of existing infrastructures offer to the imagination, implementation, and governance of cyberinfrastructure?
By generalizing the lessons of social and historical analysis, this workshop will contribute to the development of infrastructure studies as a distinctive and practically engaged field of study, while also reporting back to the NSF with useful input for the cyberinfrastructure design process.
The History and Theory of Infrastructure workshop was hosted by the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and sponsored by the NSF program in Human and Social Dynamics, the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
Workshop Final Report - Understanding Infrastructure
Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Cory P. Knobel. "Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design." Report of a Workshop on History and Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures. January 2007.
Persistent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353
Site organization
- Agenda - schedule of events
- Topics - lists the focus areas and discussion facilitators, links to "think pieces"
- Readings - background literature and cyberinfrastructure reports
- Participants - biographies of all participants
- Travel - directions to and within Ann Arbor, includes info about travel and accommodations
- Contact - getting in touch with the workshop organizers
- Video of panel - recording of the opening panel, "Growing Infrastructures"
- Workshop blogs - capture of participant comments during the workshop