Dumas Primbault | Do Infrastructures Have Epistemologies? Studying an Open Access Infrastructure for SSH from Within | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

Over the past 30 years, digital infrastructures for open science in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) have flourished as technical means to address the supposed needs of communities of practice—e.g. in research or publishing—and broader “stakeholders” such as scientific institutions and governments at large. Paraphrasing Langdon Winner, we can ask the rhetorical question of whether infrastructures have epistemologies. Indeed, SSH infrastructures are technical arrangements that embody and enforce a specific “order of knowledge”. Consequently, from an epistemological point of view, one can question how this status bears on research made both thanks to and within SSH infrastructures: What socio-epistemic features do SSH infrastructures exhibit and in what ways do they relate to broader practices in the SSH?

As coordinator of OpenEdition Lab, a small in-house team of researchers hosted by the French public open infrastructure OpenEdition, it is expected of me to partake in the development of the infrastructure by studying it from within. In this context, what does it mean to “study an open access infrastructure for SSH from within”? In what ways does its functioning, inherited from Big (natural) Science and engineering, shape research agendas, fields, and methods? Reciprocally, in what ways can such an in-house lab contribute to the development of open science for SSH and beyond?

In this contribution, I will first trace an impressionist genealogy of SSH infrastructures in order to highlight the socio-epistemic features they may exhibit in their “normal” functioning. Then, in the case of OpenEdition and its Lab, I will dwell on how the original conflict between the “spontaneous epistemology” that drives the infrastructure and the sociotechnical constructivism in which the Lab is rooted translates into a set of socio-epistemic frictions. Ultimately, this reflection will help me shed light on how to build a genuine “research posture” more akin to observant participation, than traditional participant observation, and able to address the specific research topics raised by an open digital infrastructure for SSH.