ABSTRACT
What, or indeed when (Engeström 1990), is an infrastructure? For some, the word conjures the built world – all that is crumbling in the United States … roads, railway systems, bridges. For others, it evokes something more shimmery – information. Of course, information infrastructures are still highly material (Dourish and Mazmanian 2013): the “cloud” takes form as massive, squat server farms built in cold climbs to allow for efficient cooling, cables snaking along the ocean floor (Starosielski 2015), electronic parts assembled in dire working conditions in the global south. This chapter is about knowledge infrastructures.1 I define knowledge infra-
structures as the network of institutions, people, buildings, and information resources which enable us to turn observation and contemplation of the world into a standardized set of knowledge objects: journal articles and monographs. At the very instauration of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon (1952 [1620]; cf. Siskin and Warner 2010) remarked that knowledge production was much like any other form of production: “The productions of the mind and hand seem very numerous in books and manufactures. But all this variety lies in an exquisite subtlety and derivations from a few things already known, not in the number of axioms.” And indeed one of the founding texts of science studies is entitled The Manufacture of Knowledge (Knorr-Cetina 1981). Just as factories require physical infrastructure (roads, railways, canals, plants), so do institutions of knowledge production (information infrastructures, libraries, campuses). The central arguments I make in this paper are that we have created since
the Enlightenment a vast knowledge infrastructure (KI), that it is in the process of fundamental change, and that its “learning process” is double: adapting to our new socioeconomic forms and experimenting with new cognitive divisions of labor and new forms of knowledge expression in tune with this adaptation.
