Socio-technical Infrastructure Research Articles

Understanding Digital Inequality: A Theoretical Kaleidoscope

The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we propose a methodological toolkit: a theoretical kaleidoscope to examine and critique the constitutive elements and dimensions of digital inequalities. We argue that such a tool is helpful when a critical attitude to examine ‘the ideology of digitalism’, its concomitant inequalities, and the huge losses it entails for human flourishing seems urgent. In the paper, we describe different theoretical approaches that can be used for the kaleidoscope. We give relevant examples of each theory. We argue that the postdigital does not mean that the digital is over, rather that it has mutated into new power structures that are less evident but no less insidious as they continue to govern socio-technical infrastructures, geopolitics, and markets. In this sense, it is vital to find tools that allow us to shed light on such invisible and pervasive power structures and the consequences in the daily lives of so many.

Digital Domination and the Promise of Radical Republicanism

In this paper, I approach the power of digital platforms by using the republican concept of domination. More specifically, I argue that the traditional, agent-relative interpretation of domination, in the case of digital domination, is best supplemented by a more radical version, on which republicans ought to give priority to structural elements. I show how radical republicanism draws attention to (1) the economic rationales and the socio-technical infrastructures that underlie and support digital platforms and to (2) the forms of influence that are directed at cognitive dimensions, such as habituation and routinisation, which are particularly relevant for the power of digital platforms. These insights also imply that republicans have reason to favour a more structural response to digital platforms over more direct and individualised forms of control that fit with a ‘standard’ republican approach, such as securing exit options and requiring user consent.

Storage city: Water tanks, jerry cans, and batteries as infrastructure in Nairobi

Against the ‘normative concept of the networked city’, urban studies and infrastructure research have seen a shift towards investigations beyond the network that engage with the post-networked city, heterogeneous infrastructures, and other situations ‘on, off, below and beyond’ the grid, especially in southern cities. Expanding on debates around southern urbanisms and their socio-technical infrastructures, we explore a ubiquitous yet rarely discussed element of contemporary urban infrastructures: storage. In Nairobi, a city shaped by infrastructural heterogeneity and uncertainty, households of all backgrounds and sizes store water and electricity within various constellations of actors, practices and artefacts. We show how domestic storage, its artefacts and practices cumulate in a storage city that is not opposed to a networked or post-networked city but rather entangled with it. We present domestic storage as crucial infrastructure to the socio-technical functioning of Nairobi, discuss diverse storage artefacts and practices, and highlight how a focus on storage can contribute to re-imaginings of infrastructural articulations beyond networks and flows.

A Tale of Two Social Credit Systems: The Succeeded and Failed Adoption of Machine Learning in Sociotechnical Infrastructures

A Tale of Two Social Credit Systems: The Succeeded and Failed Adoption of Machine Learning in Sociotechnical Infrastructures

Understanding the Role of Socio-Technical Infrastructures on the Organization of Access for the Mixed-Ability Collaborators

TPositioning disabled people as deficient, dysfunctional, and locating the 'problem' of disability within the individual, the over-medicalized, individualistic, and not equity-oriented perspectives of disability have led to oppression, discrimination, and exclusion of disabled people from important parts of public life. The global politics of disability rights and disability movements have brought thorny questions regarding the nature of dominant explanations. Equity-oriented perspectives and collaborative approaches regarding organization and distribution of access started to gain visibility. HCI research has a vital potential to contribute to this by providing related tools and technologies for integrating equal access in the collaborative organization of access. Considering the existing literature, the question of how access is collaboratively organized, negotiated, distributed and scaled through socio-technical mechanisms especially at an institutional level, as well as how mixed-ability groups reorganize access by interacting with institutional socio-technical structures remains open. In this research, I aim to extend the body of literature in collaborative access by presenting the importance of socio-technical perspectives for designing collaborative technologies to support equal distribution of access. My research is about the signifcance of equity perspectives in access and interaction. Specifcally, this research focuses on understanding the role of socio-technical infrastructures for the organization and distribution of access by mixed-ability collaborators and developing design insights for socio-technical mechanisms to support equal distribution of access for people with disabilities.

Modelling doctoral dissertations in Wikidata knowledge graph: Selected issues

Academic libraries have a long tradition of collecting, preserving, and offering access to information about doctoral dissertations through the repositories of electronic theses and dissertations. In recent years libraries have turned their attention to Wikidata as a knowledge graph for publishing structured data on the Web. These initiatives include the publication of metadata about theses and dissertations. However, Wikidata is a sociotechnical infrastructure, where the responsibility for its development is in the hands of its users. This includes asynchronous collaborative work on its ontology by many non-expert users. This may cause tensions between traditional metadata control and socially developed schemas. The goal of this article is to develop a conceptual understanding of the representation patterns of doctoral dissertations in a socially constructed Wikidata knowledge graph. This study uses an interpretative approach guided by the method of the close reading of the infrastructure to develop an understanding of what a doctoral dissertation is in this socially constructed representation of reality and how doctoral dissertations are described using Wikidata ontology. The ontological status of the doctoral dissertation is revealed by interpreting the place of this concept in the taxonomic structure of the Wikidata ontology. The expressiveness of Wikidata ontology for the description of doctoral dissertations is limited to three selected properties, authorship, doctoral advisor, and the institution to which the dissertation was submitted. The results of this study show on the one hand the redundancies in modelling doctoral dissertations, and on the other inconsistencies in the descriptions. This calls for close attention from libraries to metadata curatorial practices in Wikidata sociotechnical infrastructure.

Socio-technical challenges towards data-driven and integrated urban water management: A socio-technical network approach

Data-driven and integrated urban water management have been proposed to reduce surface water pollution in light of climate change and urbanization impacts. Besides technological innovation, data-driven and integrated management require information exchange among many actors, e.g., operators, engineers, or authorities. With the aim of achieving a more profound understanding of socio-technical infrastructures, such as urban water systems, I draw on the approach of socio-technical networks to study actors and infrastructure elements as well as multiple relations in-between. In this article, I investigate whether underlying socio-technical dependencies influence social interactions such as information exchange. More specifically related to data-driven and integrated management, I analyze potential challenges, such as organizational fragmentation, data access, and diverging perceptions. Based on empirical data from three case studies in Switzerland, I provide inferential results obtained from fitting exponential random graph models. Findings showed that actors’ relatedness to infrastructure elements affects their information exchange. Among the cases, the presence of the three challenges varied and is potentially contingent upon system size, organizational form, or progress in terms of data-driven and integrated management. Thus, incorporating a socio-technical perspective on social actors and infrastructure elements could help to improve policy design and implementation aiming to achieve more sustainable cities.

Mapping the Inclusion of Children and Youth With Disabilities in Media Literacy Research

The way we communicate and make meaning in a complex socio-technical infrastructure demands multiple literacies. Media-literate citizens must be able to create, evaluate and effectively use information, media, and technology. The pandemic context demanded increased online learning and work, highlighting the importance of media literacy in citizens’ lives. Although in recent years, crucial reforms have happened in education for children with disabilities, media education for them is residual and framed on medical concepts neglecting how disability is socially constructed. Aiming to map recent research (2015–2021) in the field of media literacy and children with disabilities, a systematic literature review was conducted. The number of articles obtained from a search for “media literacy and children” in the scientific databases (<em>N</em> = 1,175) supports the relevance of media literacy in research. Filtering these data for “children with disabilities” reveals an inexpressive sample, with 12 articles included in the study after the eligibility phase. The overall results indicate that this population is significantly underrepresented in media literacy research, explained by a low prevalence of studies with disabled children as an audience. Moreover, research designs have shown a greater focus on conceptual approaches, highlighting a deficit of fieldwork and tangible interventions. Strong ableist media discourses emerged as a barrier to the promotion of media literacy in this population, with a clear mismatch between media representations and the current disability paradigms, besides all the positive aspects of the actions registered in the sample.

Global networks of money and information at the crossroads: Correspondent banking and SWIFT

AbstractThis article explores how transaction information is a fundamental element enabling and fostering global flows of money. Financial systems, constructed around account‐based money, require infrastructure, which is separated into two parts: messaging and settlement, performed via trusted agents. This separation has allowed the geographical expansion of banking, and to this day constitutes a key architecture of increasingly global networks of money. Focusing on the correspondent banking system and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, this article demonstrates the workings of this infrastructure in cross‐border payments and in enacting economic sanctions. This sociotechnical infrastructure is a crucial yet overlooked area of global banking, which makes global economic and financial activity possible in the first place. Importantly, by analysing the organizational architecture of the global payments system and including the actors and agencies within it, we elucidate the (changing) relationships between data/information, geographies and power, contributing to the formation of a literature that conceptualizes financial infrastructure.

Modeling Threats to AI-ML Systems Using STRIDE.

The application of emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), entails risks that need to be addressed to ensure secure and trustworthy socio-technical infrastructures. Machine Learning (ML), the most developed subfield of AI, allows for improved decision-making processes. However, ML models exhibit specific vulnerabilities that conventional IT systems are not subject to. As systems incorporating ML components become increasingly pervasive, the need to provide security practitioners with threat modeling tailored to the specific AI-ML pipeline is of paramount importance. Currently, there exist no well-established approach accounting for the entire ML life-cycle in the identification and analysis of threats targeting ML techniques. In this paper, we propose an asset-centered methodology—STRIDE-AI—for assessing the security of AI-ML-based systems. We discuss how to apply the FMEA process to identify how assets generated and used at different stages of the ML life-cycle may fail. By adapting Microsoft’s STRIDE approach to the AI-ML domain, we map potential ML failure modes to threats and security properties these threats may endanger. The proposed methodology can assist ML practitioners in choosing the most effective security controls to protect ML assets. We illustrate STRIDE-AI with the help of a real-world use case selected from the TOREADOR H2020 project.

RetrofittAR: Supporting Hardware-Centered Expertise Sharing in Manufacturing Settings through Augmented Reality

Since almost the onset of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), the community has been concerned with how expertise sharing can be supported in different settings. Here, the complex handling of machines based on experience and knowledge is increasingly becoming a challenge. In our study, we investigated expertise sharing in a medium-sized manufacturing company in an effort to support the fostering of hardware-based expertise sharing by using augmented reality (AR) to ‘retrofit’ machines. We, therefore, conducted a preliminary empirical study to understand how expertise is shared in practice and what current support is available. Based on the findings, we derived design challenges and implications for the design of AR systems in manufacturing settings. The main challenges, we found, had to do with existing socio-technical infrastructure and the contextual nature of expertise. We implemented a HoloLens application called RetrofittAR that supports learning on the production machine during actual use. We evaluated the system during the company’s actual production process. The results show which data types are necessary to support expertise sharing and how our design supports the retrofitting of old machines. We contribute to the current state of research in two ways. First, we present the knowledge-intensive practice of operating older production machines through novel AR interfaces. Second, we outline how retrofitting measures with new visualisation technologies can support knowledge-intensive production processes.

Decolonial perspectives on global higher education: Disassembling data infrastructures, reassembling the field

ABSTRACT The expansion of university systems across the planet over the last fifty years has led to the emergence of a new policy assemblage – ‘global higher education’ that depends on the collection, curation and representation of quantitative data. In this paper I explore the use of data by higher education policy actors to sustain ‘epistemic coloniality’. Building on a rich genealogy of anticolonial, postcolonial and feminist scholarship, I show how decolonial theory can be used to critique dominant global higher education imaginaries and the data infrastructures they depend on. Tracing the history of these infrastructures, I begin with OECD’s creation of decontextualised educational ‘indicators’. I go on to track the policy impact of global university league tables owned by commercial organisations. They assemble and commensurate institutional data into rankings that become taken-for-granted ‘global’ policy knowledge. I end by exploring the policy challenge of building alternative socio-technical infrastructures, and finding new ways to value higher education.

An integrated framework for managing fire resilience of metro station system: Identification, assessment, and optimization

As a sociotechnical infrastructure system constituting equipment and facilities, operational staff, and passengers, the metro station system (MSS) is under fire threat from varying causes. Although fires occupy a high portion of all hazards occurring in the MSS, how the MSS in operation can systematically cope with fires has drawn scant attention. To improve MSSs’ poor performance across the fire management cycle, the concept of fire resilience is proposed based on the system resilience theory. The disaster scene analysis, TOSE approach, and modified TOPSIS method are combined to identify fire resilience indexes. Then, a Bayesian network is developed to assess fire resilience and reveal critical causal chain in fire scenes. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis and dynamic Bayesian network with critical importance analysis are adopted to formulate optimization strategies for different periods of operating life. The resulting framework is applied to Nanjing MSS, providing operational staff and decision makers with practical tools to engage in long-term resilient operation of MSS against fires within a clear manageable scope. The results indicate passengers’ escape skills and safety behaviors, security screening operations, equipment inspection and maintenance, and rescue service access are the prime factors resulting in low fire resilience; meanwhile, economic resource allocation should be prioritized for optimization initially, but optimization priorities should be transferred to the less controllable passengers’ escape skills and aging firefighting equipment as operating life increases. The integration of identification, assessment, and optimization methods can also be flexibly embedded into various infrastructure systems’ operation management processes to optimize disaster resilience continuously.

Platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: Theorizing a hyper-scalable computing regime

There has been an explosion of scholarship on platform capitalism, with scholars identifying emergent labor practices, organizational forms, and business models. There is broad agreement that successful platform companies quickly dominate their markets, and winner-takes-all scenarios are common. However, market domination should not only be viewed as a condition but also as a process that is defined by specific drivers and practices. With regard to rapid expansion, much is said about network effects and data-intensive business models that are fueled by speculative logics as well as weak regulatory mechanisms. I advance the discussion on expansion and hyper-scalability by focusing on the transformation in underlying computing arrangements that shape the growth of platform-based companies. This article establishes cloud computing arrangements as setting the foundational sociotechnical infrastructure that drives rapid expansion.

Processes of Proliferation

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.

Socio-Technical Infrastructure Interdependencies and Their Implications for Urban Sustainability; Recent Insights from the Netherlands

Socio-Technical Infrastructure Interdependencies and Their Implications for Urban Sustainability; Recent Insights from the Netherlands

Working at the Seams of Colonial Structures: Alternative Sociotechnical Infrastructures Revealed by Hurricane Maria

This study explains why and how Puerto Rican activists responded effectively to the crisis in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. By relying on a structural approach, this study analyzes the local institutional environment. Using the seamful work framework, it examines activists’ practice to reveal activists’ relation with their official state infrastructure and their interactions with said infrastructure before and after Maria. Using semi-structured interviews, observations, and publicly available documents, this study shows that activists navigate the state’s unequal infrastructure by building their infrastructures, called alternative sociotechnical infrastructures, which consist of a set of heterogeneous assortments of actors, organizations, and technologies to address state-driven inequality and natural disasters. Activists do not work to restore existing state infrastructures, instead, they deploy their expertise in their communities to address many of the challenges brought on by disasters. This study emphasizes a bottom-up approach, highlighting local actors’ agency by focusing on the convergence of their knowledge, organizations, and Information and Communication Technologies. Moreover, this research proposes that state-community disconnect is rooted in neoliberal and colonial measures and cautions against considering disasters as opportunities to start anew. Finally, this research proposes new possibilities to plan bottom-up relief efforts that acknowledge the role of civil society and activists.

Platforms and Institutions in the Post-Pandemic University: a Case Study of Social Media and the Impact Agenda

In this paper, we argue that digital platforms play an important role within higher education, not least of all when Covid-19 has made remote working the norm. An increasingly rich field of theoretical and empirical work has helped us understand platforms as socio-technical infrastructures which shape the activity of their users. Their insertion into higher education raises urgent institutional questions which necessitate dispensing with the individualised mode of analysis and instrumentalised conception of technology which often accompany these topics. We outline an alternative approach through a case study of social media in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, exploring the incorporation of platforms into research evaluation. Our findings suggest social media is invoked differently across disciplinary groupings, as well as platform metrics being cited in a naive and problematic matter. We offer a neo-institutionalist analysis which identifies a tendency towards isomorphism, with perceived ‘best practice’ being seized upon in response to uncertainty. We suggest such an approach is urgently needed given the role which digital platforms will play in building the post-Pandemic university.

Overcoming barriers to social media use through multisensor integration in emergency management systems

For over a decade, the field of crisis informatics has observed novel, ad hoc uses of social media among citizens and digital volunteers while noting barriers that impede social media use among municipal responders during crises. These barriers include a lack of tools for processing social media data, a lack of staff to use these tools, and a lack of trust in information gathered from citizens. However, while studies address the collection, processing, and use of social media per se, research continues to overlook the necessity of integrating information gathered from social media and existing information sources relied on by responders working across municipal agencies.Through scenario-based interviews with municipal responders, this study observes that objectives of early warning and proactive emergency response motivate uses of social media during periods of stability to address gaps in information reported by 911 callers, on-scene responders, and various physical sensors. To accomplish these objectives, upstream PSAP staff must process information from multiple physical and social sensors, cue other sensors to verify untrusted reports, and integrate multisensor information for dispatch to downstream first responders, emergency managers, and PIOs. Together, these findings suggest that overcoming barriers to social media use resulting from a lack of tools, staff, and trust requires new and existing sociotechnical infrastructures that facilitate intra- and inter-organizational processes of multisensor integration across periods of stability and crisis.

ENTANGLED AUTONOMY ON AUTOMATED AIRWAVES: THE CASE OF RIVENDELL

Rivendell, a free and open source software suite for automated radio broadcasting, has brought several groups with clashing stances on technology, communication, and cultural politics into cooperation. This paper treats Rivendell as an opening onto the politics at play when the liberal ethos propelling free and open source software (Coleman, 2013) meets the autonomy-prizing traditions of independent broadcasting within an automation system. Complicating this already tense juncture, Rivendell has drawn users and code contributors from drastically opposed political groups within American broadcastings—right-wing Christian talk radio networks and progressive community stations—and has sustained a difficult terrain of working compromise that the activist push for low-power FM broadcasting inaugurated (Dunbar-Hester, 2014). In this paper, analysis of Rivendell's open source code base sheds light on its development and helps connect it to longer histories of media automation and its attendant social frictions. Interviews with lead Rivendell developers complete the picture of the project's trajectory, of its relation to the religious right context where the project began, and of the negotiations that have played out among its developers and its community of users in terrestrial and internet radio. The ongoing compromises and tensions threaded through Rivendell can offer insight into an issue that becomes larger and more pressing as media become increasingly complex and networked: how artists, activists, and media technologists who prioritize independence have reckoned with their reliance on socio-technical infrastructures whose connections may strike them as far less than savory.