Análisis de la información

How do blogs as infrastructure inform our understanding of scholarly communication?

This question betrays an assumption about the nature of blogs. In the initial formulation of the project, blogs were characterized as infrastructure and it was their infrastructural dynamics that were subject to investigation. While blogs may be an infrastructure for scholarly communication, the infrastructural dynamics are difficult to distinguish from the Open Web.

I argue blogs are infrastructure as evidenced by considering Star’s (1999b) nine infrastructural properties:

-   Embeddedness: Blogs are intimately tied up with the Open Web, which is in turn sunk into the lower level communications networks of the Internet. -   Transparency: Platforms like WordPress and Blogger make the process of

hosting blogs and authoring posts easy enough for the non-technical members of the digital humanities community.

-   Reach or scope: Digital humanities blogs extend both spatially and temporally across the globe. They are distributed and managed across individuals and institutions.

-   Learned as a part of membership: Blogging has been normalized within the community. The fear of being identified as a blogger has passed and now it could be argued you have to have a blog to be a digital humanist (it -   Links with conventions of practice: One of the defining characteristics of

the digital humanities is an ethos of openness. Blogs are by definition open access and embody those ideals of openness, both in the practical meaning of access, but also in a larger spirit of openness related to reaching non- academic audiences like the “public.”

-   Embodiment of standards: Humanities computing has a tradition of informal communication, as evidenced by the long history of the

HUMANIST mailing list. Informal channels have always been important because formal channels of communication can’t accommodate multi- modal forms of scholarly expression or the alien epistemologies of computational research. Blogs, as evidenced by the para-academic

category, enable these forms of expression by plugging into the expressive capacities afforded by open standards on the Open Web.

-   Built on an installed base: Digital humanities blogging is possible because blogging is a generalized practice on the Open Web. It leverages existing platforms, like WordPress and Blogger, but it also initially inherited the expectations of blogging as an informal and unruly discursive space with little to no epistemic value. The extra-academic category shows that installed base does exist, but it is a small percentage in comparison to the other three categories of informal scholarly communication.

-   Becomes visible upon breakdown: The work of maintaining a blog is invisible to readers, until something breaks. Topics 8 and 18 of the model included keywords like cialis and levitra, mixed in with words about books and literary history. Several of the blogs in the sample had been hacked filled the posts with links to virility drugs. Managing a blog with comments on the Open Web means constantly filtering out spam; one person’s

invisible infrastructure is another person’s daily work.

-   Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally: Being hacked is often the result of an out-of-date WordPress instance. Blog owners must update their self-hosted blogging platforms, digital humanities blogs are not centrally managed by the community. Control is highly distributed across individual scholars, institutions, and commercial companies. This is the flip side of Open Publishing, anyone is free to create their own

discursive space, but it they are responsible for management and repair. In the context of this project, I argue for blogs as an infrastructure for informal communication in the digital humanities, but this is a soft-argument. Scholarly blogs or blogs more generally may or may not be an infrastructure that is readily distinguishable from the Open Web. The nine infrastructural properties of blogs

enumerated above are mixed together with the Open Web. This raises a question, if blogs are not their own unique infrastructure, then what are they?

Are blogs a platform? The emerging discipline of platform studies (Bogost & Montfort 2009) might provide a useful lens by which to unpack this quandary. According to the official website, “platform Studies investigates the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems.”118 _{Platform studies is related to what Sandvig}

(2013) calls the “new materialist” approach to studying infrastructures. It has direct connections to new media studies and the digital humanities. Such an approach might focus more on WordPress and Blogger.com, colloquially called “platforms,” which are a material manifestation of blogs in software.

Are blogs a format or a convention? Blogs are composed from open standards, HTML and RSS, but there is no W3C standard for blogs. They are a convention of

practice, which is an infrastructural property, which illuminates the

sociotechnical dynamics. Yet, considering blogs as a convention doesn’t readily provide a theoretical scaffolding or lens with which to examine blogs as a conceptual object.

Are blogs a genre? I hesitate to use the term genre because it invokes the wrath of literary scholars. I am not equipped to fully situate blogs within the breadth and depth of genre studies, but as a category of creative expression, I would argue blogs are not a single genre. Rettberg (2013) identified three styles of blogs, personal blogs, link blogs, and topic-centric blogs. My analysis shows that scholarly blogs exhibit four different categories of communication. Genre is not specific enough as an analytical category and it doesn’t highlight the technical and material facets of blogs.

So what are blogs? Platform studies, genre studies, and other theoretical frameworks from new media studies can and should be brought together with infrastructure studies to understand blogs and reconcile the similarities and

differences between these various frameworks. This project leveraged the theoretical and conceptual frame of infrastructure to motivate an inquiry into digital humanities blogs and specifically address the issues of scale.