History and Theory of Infrastructure: Distilling Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures: University of Michigan, September 2006

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By harnessing the power of tera- and petaflop computing, very large federated databases, and advanced software components, new cyberinfrastructures promise dramatic opportunities for scientific advances, but they also face major challenges, particularly in the design of organizational architectures and social practices. At this relatively early phase of cyberinfrastructure development, there is a significant opportunity to learn from past challenges in infrastructure design. To explore these, an intensive 3-day workshop will be held at the University of Michigan in September 2006, bringing infrastructure designers together with experts in history and sociology of technology. The workshop will seek practical lessons for cyberinfrastructure in the experience of other infrastructures, such as railroads, waterworks, highways, telephony, business communication systems, and the Internet, along with 'second-order' infrastructures such as the world weather data network. By generalizing the lessons of social and historical analysis, this workshop will contribute to the development of infrastructure studies as a practically engaged field of study, while at the same time training leading scholars and practitioners in the emergent challenges of current cyberinfrastructure development.