What Is Cyberinfrastructure?

We need first to define our terms—especially the term that is most essential to this report: cyberinfrastructure. The infrastructure of scholarship was built over centuries. It includes diverse collections of primary sources in libraries, archives, and museums; the bibliographies, searching aids, citation systems, and concordances that make that information retrievable; the standards that are embodied in cataloging and classification systems; the journals and university presses that distribute the information; and the editors, librarians, archivists, and curators who link the operation of this structure to the scholars who use it. All of these elements have extensions or analogues in cyberinfrastructure, at least in the cyberinfrastructure that is required for humanities and social sciences.

The 2003 National Science Foundation report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure (hereafter referred to as the “Atkins report,” after Dan Atkins, who chaired the committee that produced it) described cyberinfrastructureas a “layer of enabling hardware, algorithms, software, communications, institutions, and personnel” that lies between a layer of “base technologies . . . the integrated electro-optical components of computation, storage, and communication” and a layer of “software programs, services, instruments, data, information, knowledge, and social practices applicable to specific projects, disciplines, and communities of practice.” In other words, for the Atkins report (and for this one), cyberinfrastructure is more than a tangible network and means of storage in digitized form, and it is not only discipline-specific software applications and project-specific data collections. It is also the more intangible layer of expertise and the best practices, standards, tools, collections and collaborative environments that can be broadly shared across communities of inquiry. “This layer,” as the Atkins report notes, “should provide an effective and efficient platform for the empowerment of specific communities of researchers to innovate and eventually revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.” As the NSF panel issuing that report further noted, “if infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy.”

One characteristic of infrastructure is that it is deeply embedded in the way we do our work. When it works efficiently, it is invisible: we use it without really thinking about it. When we drive a car, we rely on an infrastructure that includes physical systems of minor and major roads; societal and governmental systems for licensing drivers, setting speed limits, and codifying driver conduct; and economic systems of license fees and gasoline taxes to maintain and expand the roads. The technical and societal systems that make up cyberinfrastructure will need to support the entire range of research goals, legal requirements, and objects of attention for the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Infrastructure becomes an installed base on which other things are built. Because it is extensive and expensive, infrastructure tends to be built incrementally, not all at once nor everywhere at once. 1In the humanities and social sciences, we have been building extensive and widely used collections—digital libraries—over the last fifteen years or more, and we have been developing standards for expressing, exchanging, and preserving these collections. Now it is time to build the tools that will enable new learning and teaching and to develop new audiences who can benefit from this scholarship.