iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by James Smithies

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Web page I made collecting copies of all Bluesky threads I recently posted describing our Critical Infrastructures and Digital Humanities book (Debates in DH series): alanyliu.org/wp-content/u... @uminnpress.bsky.social

alanyliu.org

Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities — Bluesky threads

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

From Susan Brown’s Chap. 2 (“Replatforming”) in _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_ (p. 66 in print edition), dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica.... @susanbrown.bsky.social

Paragraph from Susan Brown's Chap. 2 ("Replatforming") in _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_ (p. 66 in print edition):

"This chapter probes scholarly platforms through the concept of replatforming, a critical inversion of what social media calls _deplatforming_. Deplatforming bans individuals from platforms, whereas _replatforming_ invokes collective iterative activity. Replatforming prompts inquiry into what it means to provide and sustain platforms to advance digital scholarship and online diversity. My argument has three sections discussing the benefits and risks of scholarly platforms (_re:platforming_); the critical implications of republishing data (_re-platforming_); and the challenges of ongoing repair and rebuilding (_replatforming_). While they differ in scale and purpose from the sites of platform capitalism, digital humanities (DH) platforms nevertheless warrant examination. Intersectional feminist, Indigenous, critical race, and archival studies suggest how infrastructure can advance social justice and mitigate harm, underscoring the need for scholarly involvement in the ongoing relational work of creating and sustaining knowledge platforms."

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Our editors’ description of @susanbrown.bsky.social’s Chap. 2 (“Replatforming”) in _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_, dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica.... (Editors’ Introduction, pp. 16-17 in print ed.).

Paragraph from "Introduction" in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (pp. 16-17 in print edition) about Susan Brown’s Chap. 2 (“Replatforming”) in _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_:

"In chapter 2, “Replatforming,” Susan Brown draws on digital humanities initiatives such as Project Orlando, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS), and others to contribute to the critical discussion of “platforms.” Drawing on insights from the extensive work that she and collaborators have done on scholarly digital platforms, she discusses the unexpectedly complex ethics of “re-platforming” cultural data by republishing it on a different platform, and the sustainable and curative potential—curatorial in an expanded sense—for “replatforming” (without a hyphen). For her, the prefix “re” in the latter “replatforming” should align in its ethos with that of the same prefix in such watchwords of careful and caring digital infrastructural work as “repair” and “rebuilding.” Recognizing all the responsibilities of platforming, she concludes, opens “a path to better situated and more ethical knowledge production and circulation.”"

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Reposted by James Smithies

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

From Anne Beaulieu’s Chap. 1 (“Interfaces for the Anthropocene”) in _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_ (pp. 47-48 in print edition). dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica...

Paragraphs from Anne Beaulieu’s Chap. 1 (“Interfaces for the Anthropocene”) in _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_ (pp. 47-49 in print edition):

"In this chapter, I explore how knowledge infrastructures can help address the crises of the Anthropocene. I use the phrase “knowledge for the Anthropocene” to indicate a project that improves knowledge production as a process of creating new relations—ones in which humans are neither invisible nor standing outside nature but are accountably, reflexively present. Specifically, I delve into how recent research in digital humanities can contribute to conceptualizing and realizing better infrastructures—better in the sense that they further enable us to care (Bellacasa) by bringing issues of interdependence, responsibility, and discernment to the forefront, and in the sense that they garner sufficient trust and reliability to support action.

I focus on one aspect of infrastructures (namely, the interface) to contribute meaningfully to the vast issue of how to reinvent them. This focus makes tractable the question of what kind of knowledge we need for the Anthropocene by showing the importance of articulating and reflecting on assumptions about the source, user, and use of knowledge that is built into interfaces. It also turns our attention toward the significance of interactions and how they are shaped by the interfaces available to us. Interfaces can be designed, tackled, built, tinkered with, and/or demonstrated—and as such, they form sites of intervention toward better knowledge practices."

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Reposted by James Smithies

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Our editors’ description of Anne Beaulieu’s Chap. 1 (“Interfaces for the Anthropocene”) in _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_, dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica.... (Editors’ Introduction, p. 16 in print ed.):

Paragraph from "Introduction" in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (p. 16 in print edition) about Anne Beaulieu’s Chap. 1 (“Interfaces for the Anthropocene”):

"Anne Beaulieu thus draws on DH perspectives in chapter 1, “Interfaces for the Anthropocene,” to reflect on the implications of digital interfaces in the Anthropocene age. She argues that the tendency for interfaces to fall into the background of our awareness poses risks for responding to environmental change.56 In reflecting on the interfaces of such projects as the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS), she “aims to find effective ways to question and stop reproducing an architecture of universalism and frictionless circulation of knowledge, an architecture that furthermore hides the uneven distribution of violence and profit.” Beaulieu’s goal is to use DH to “propose a route to better interfaces through an examination of how different epistemic values might be inscribed in interfaces, enabling (but not determining) different interactions.” Importantly, this extends to decentering the human subject in interface design and privileging nonhuman actants affected by the Anthropocene."

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Reposted by James Smithies

Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Each DDH volume is an innovation, and this one is no exception. In CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE STUDIES, @alanyliu.bsky.social, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and @jamessmithies.bsky.social present the "manifest," a documenting of the infrastructure used to research and produce each chapter. Dig in here!

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

A thought we teased in our intro to Critical Infrastructure Studies and DH (p. 14-16 in print ed.): let machine learning be “co-editor”? (use “topic modeling, K-means and dendrogram clustering” to organize chapters?). Could that be the future of editing? dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica...

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

Introduction | Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities

This volume reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies as it explores how DH builds on and extends the field’s theories and technologies. Inc...

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Reposted by James Smithies

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Paragraph from intro in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (p. 11 in print ed.) reflecting my current view of “where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?” See the full argument (pp. 9-12 in print ed.): a significant evolution of my views, in light of evolution of DH.

Paragraph from "Introduction" chapter in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (p. 11 in print edition):

"DH focused on critiquing knowledge infrastructures in its own academic backyard. But the ethos of those critiques cannot be truly understood unless seen as directed through the academy toward the larger society for which the academy serves both as tutor—a role that is so far from being only symbolic that it directly entrains hundreds of millions of students each year—and, along with such other institutions as journalism and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—as guardian, watchdog, or, at minimum, alternative mode of work and governance. In other words, DH joins other academic fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences, in pursuing one of the most fundamental aspirations of the academy: to conduct scholarship in a manner that models how scholars believe society at large should ideally function to resolve difficult issues of fairness and truth. In this sense, the academy itself is for DH the “medium” for thinking about society; and digital academic infrastructures are thus DH’s equivalent of “new media studies.” After all, what philosophers of science call “epistemic virtues” (values for the conduct of scholarly knowledge, such as rationality, rigor, thoroughness, openness, and richness) are always also social virtues, especially when instituted in shared governance and other organizational forms of collaboration or openness, even if these themselves require vigilance, as in critical university studies.50 When digital humanists code or critique in the spirit of collaboration or openness, they are trying to change the Heideggerian “hammer” of digital technologies and its EdTech extensions into an infrastructure that is true not just to the institution but to the spirit of the humanities as it contributes to society. What would a humane, nuanced, supple, or empathetic hammer be? Such are questions for the digital humanities."

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

A paragraph from our introduction chapter in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (p. 4 in print edition) that lays the foundation for what makes contemporary infrastructure studies “critical” in a humanistic sense: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica....

$Paragraph from "Introduction"chapter in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (p. 4 in print edition): "Against that background, the powerful, contrasting idea that today emerges from fusing the brokenness and relationality axioms in infrastructure studies may be put as follows: infrastructure is not just material systems functioning in social systems. It also embodies the relational differences in any social system that are profoundly dysfunctional and antisystemic—like Kristallnacht fractures in a pane of glass never meant by underlying or overlording social forces to be anything other than broken. In other words, infrastructure studies fuses the concepts of brokenness and social relationality to depict infrastructure as systematically antisystemic. Infrastructure is a system that works for some, but for that very reason, is broken for others. More cruelly, as in the case of city benches made with protrusions to prevent unhoused poor people from sleeping on them, it is designed to be broken for others.23 Systemically antisystemic infrastructure is an extreme example of what Foucault called a dispositif (usually translated as “apparatus”): “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble . . . of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” (Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 194). In the context of infrastructure studies, heterogeneous ultimately means—beyond temporary, makeshift patchworks of ill-sorted and, in the last instance, conflicting apparatuses—broken. For Foucault, after all, hetero-anything—e.g., “heterotopia” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”)—signals the break or fracture in any supposed unity or identity. Detecting the hetero in the homogeneous or universal is Foucault’s indictment of any fantasy that humanity can ever be systemically self-identical."$

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Reposted by James Smithies

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

A paragraph from beginning of our introduction chapter in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (p. 1-2 in print edition) that frames our “object of study,” dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica...

Paragraph from "Introduction" in Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (p. 1-2 in print edition). Abridged transcription:

"The study of infrastructure thus joins a lineage of previous intellectual paradigms, each of which looked at the world afresh from the viewpoint of a specific object of study, in object’s epistemic sense as a theme or topic. Since the nineteenth century, this methodological lineage (eventually more a meshwork than a single line of descent) has taken up objects of study that include the following:

• Ideas (in traditions of intellectual history such as Hegelian philosophy and German Geisteswissenschaften, Anglo-American history of ideas, and French histoire des mentalités)
• Mind (from psychoanalytic theory to recent cognitive science)
• Language (in structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literature, and other fields)
• Design (as professionalized and theorized after the Bauhaus era in architecture, industrial design, graphic arts, user interface design, and other design fields)
• Institution (in organizational and neoinstitutional studies)
• Ideology and culture (in cultural studies from the 1960s on)
• Identity (in race, ethnicity, gender, postcolonial, and other approaches to social groups and nationalities)
• Environment (in environmental studies)
• Media (in media and digital new media studies)

Each paradigm directed inquiry in novel directions, advancing new questions and new ways to ask those questions. Each also unpredictably inflected the others....

As a recently minted object of humanistic and social science study, infrastructure is distinctive among the other paradigms that it joins because it surfaces the literal objects that, in Martin Heidegger’s terms, “enframes” any epistemic object of study...."

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Announcing the release of the online, open-access edition of _Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities_ (in Debates in DH series): dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/cri.... Editors: Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, James Smihties @jamessmithies.bsky.social). Print ed. appeared January 2026

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Blurbs (including mine) for @jamessmithies.bsky.social’s book, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age. Glad to have been able to watch this book evolve during the past few years.

Blurbs for James Smithies' book, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age (2026). The text of the blurbs is as follows:

<blurb1>
Alan Liu, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara --
A sweeping view of how our digital age unfolds from the long history of modernity with all its tensions of determinism versus contingency, and Western universalism versus global multiplicity. Smithies's astonishingly broad, detailed, and interlaced knowledge of computation, philosophy, and history undergirds a powerful guiding message.
</blurb>

<blurb2>
Katherine Bode, Professor of Digital Literary Studies, Australian National University --
Digital Modernity is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand not just what digital technologies do but how they are deeply entangled in modernity's contested pasts and what they mean for our collective futures.
</blurb>

<blurb3>
Peter Beilharz, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, La Trobe University --
The great contribution of James Smithies is to learn and to bridge the digital revolution and the tradition of critical theory and sociology. This is pioneering work, full of insight and provocation, addressing both text and context, opening up the pathways of understanding.
</blurb>

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Reposted by James Smithies

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Just published In open access: @jamessmithies.bsky.social’s book, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age, www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon.... Abstract in screenshot.

Abstract for James Smithies, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age (2026). Text reads in part as follows:

“This is the first systematic theorization of digital modernity, arguing that the digital age cannot be understood apart from the long historical arc of modernity.

Bridging digital humanities, critical theory, sociology, philosophy, and global history, Digital Modernity demonstrates that contemporary digital systems are continuations rather than ruptures of the modern project. It offers a robust conceptual framework for examining how technological infrastructures intersect with democracy, governance, colonial legacies, and the public sphere. Across nine chapters, the book moves from conceptual foundations to future-facing proposals. Topics include the cultural logic of Silicon Valley, digital colonialism, digital infrastructure, and the epistemic crisis of the digital public sphere. It also engages philosophical questions about emergence, historicism, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on applied digital humanities, the book rejects technological determinism while offering accessible accounts of computing’s technical and political histories. Readers benefit from a coherent theoretical lens that integrates history with socio-technical critique, enabling a clearer understanding of digital modernity’s present and future stakes.

This book is intended for scholars and students across digital humanities, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, the philosophy of technology, and modern history. Its interdisciplinary scope also supports research and teaching in software studies, critical AI, infrastructure studies, and global modernities….”

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James Smithies @jamessmithies.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

My book Digital Modernity (Routledge, 2026) is out, and open access. Argument: the digital age can't be understood without modernity's long history. AI, colonialism, the public sphere are all explored. www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon... #DigitalHumanities #DigitalModernity #AI

Digital Modernity (Routledge, 2026) book cover

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Reposted by James Smithies

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

U Minnesota Press's Spring 26 catalog, listing our new Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities (in Debates in DH series), eds. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, @jamessmithies.bsky.social): z.umn.edu/spring26. Table of contents: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social

Screenshot of page 52 University of Minnesota Press Spring 2026 catalog, showing the book cover, description, and contributor names of the new book in the Debates in DH series (ed. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies) titled _Critical Infrastructrure Studies and Digital Humanities_. The text of the description reads as follows:

How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our world.

_Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_ reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies. Featuring voices from around the globe, this volume explores how DH builds on and extends theories and technologies of infrastructure that affect society, culture, and knowledge in different national and regional contexts. Examining DH’s own infrastructural genealogy, the contributors offer readers critical reflections and bold visions for the future as they address issues of environmentalism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, multilingualism, labor justice, feminism, national development, and beyond from a variety of disciplinary perspectives embedded in concrete digital systems. Including innovative “infrastructure manifests,” the essays in this book illuminate how DH can both study and shape the systems that sustain culture, scholarship, and connection....

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James Smithies @jamessmithies.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

I'm excited to be involved in this suite of projects, and looking forward to contributing through the RSE Capacity Enhancement Project (RSE-CEP). It's a wonderful opportunity to work with the ARDC, and one of the first major projects led by our new ANU HASS Digital Research Hub: hdrh.anu.edu.au.

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Martin Paul Eve @eve.gd · 16/10/2025

Exciting book out early next year! It will be open access 6 months after print publication. I have a chapter in there on shadow libraries as infrastructure. Edited by @alanyliu.bsky.social, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608...

upress.umn.edu

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities

How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our worldCritical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities reimagines...

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Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) @aadh.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

🦉 Early Bird registrations are now open for DHA2025! Register for "Digital Archipelagos" at the Australian National University from the 2nd to the 5th of December at discounted early bird rates until the 10th of October! More info (including our program): dha25.org/post/registr...

dha25.org

DHA2025: Registration Open

Registration is open for DHA25. Please click through to the registration site at the Australian National University to purchase your tickets.

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James Smithies @jamessmithies.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

It's nice to be back in California. Today I'll be talking at D-Lab Berkeley about what I've learned after a year in Australia! 'Antipodal Experiments: Digital Humanities & Social Science in Australasia': dlab.berkeley.edu/events/antip... #d-hass #digitalhumanities #digitalsocialscience #rse

dlab.berkeley.edu

Antipodal Experiments: Digital Humanities & Social Science (D-HASS) in Australasia | D-Lab

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James Smithies @jamessmithies.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Help me build a research software engineering (RSE) team dedicated to the humanities and social sciences! Principal Research Software Engineer (RSE): jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/princip... Senior Research Software Engineer (RSE): jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/senior-... #digitalhumanities #digitalsocialscience

jobs.anu.edu.au

Principal Research Software Engineer - Canberra / ACT, ACT, Australia

Classification: Senior Manager 1 (Specialist)Salary package: $131,524 - $137,807 per annum plus 17% superannuation Term: Full time, Continuing A Unique Opportunity: Lead the creation of a cutting-...

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