ABSTRACT

The United States (U.S.) National Endowment for the Humanities (n.d.) defines the humanities as fields that study and interpret archeology, the arts, ethics, history, language, law, linguistics, philosophy, religion, and “aspects of [the] social sciences” (para. 5). The advent of information communication technologies (ICTs) affords humanists the capacity to employ computational methods in the production of scholarship. However, the number of disciplines in the humanities and complexities associated with ICT use mean that it is not always feasible for humanists to employ digital methods as desired.

In this chapter, I present Star and Ruhleder's (1996) relational definition of infrastructure, which implies that digital humanists can use ICT infrastructures to mitigate skill-based and financial limitations to the production of scholarship. For example, the Omeka content management system was designed to allow the creation of simple digital collections at a low-cost. However, a tension exists in the use of infrastructures. ICT infrastructures trade local, flexible use for uniform standards. Using examples from a review of papers presented at the 2017 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations annual conference, I provide best practices to navigate infrastructural tensions and facilitate more effective research practices.