1.1 The Long Now of Cyberinfrastructure

Incentives and integration in scientific software production

“…In current practice, scientific software originates in a diverse set of production systems that differ markedly in their incentive structures for creating, using, sharing, and enhancing software [7,18,24]. A sea change is in progress, however, as science shifts toward cyberinfrastructure, offering to reduce duplicated effort and enhance large scale collaboration [3,9,33,43] both in science and in the production of scientific software. Science policy makers are seeking understanding of how best to shape the practice of science to enable this vision.…”

The Dark History of HathiTrust

“…Echoing observations made by Kling [16], Edwards and colleagues hone in on some of the particular challenges and tensions slow-moving, self-preserving institutions like libraries face when they attempt to translate their deeply engrained traditions, practices, and values to a new digital environment: "Transformative infrastructures cannot merely be technical; they must engage fundamental changes in our social institutions, practices, norms and beliefs as well" [6:13]. The work of Star [19], Ribes [18], Bowker [2] and others offer insights useful for conceptualizing scale -in terms of size, time and zone of influence -in studies of infrastructure development, reminding us that DI like HT do not spring up as de novo fully fleshed forms but rather draw upon and interoperate with much older information and communication practices, norms, and technologies and therefore their study demands sensitivity to the "long now" of DI development.…”

“…This paper begins by reviewing relevant prior work, drawing primarily on digital infrastructure, digitization and digital library literatures and describing the research methods used. Focus then shifts to HT's emergence, organized around three key moments or turning points in its development where the interplay of values, power and politics proved determinative in the outcome: (1) the decision to join Google's mass digitization project ("MDP"), (2) developing the initial digital infrastructure that would become the technical backbone of HT, and (3) fleshing out the social and political dimensions of HT as a semi-autonomous collective organization operating beneath a persistent partial institutional umbrella. The paper concludes by reflecting on the spectrum of ways values, power and politics influenced the emergence and evolution of HT and briefly noting possible implications for HTs future and the future of digital infrastructures more broadly.…”