Web-based platforms play an increasingly important role in managing and sharing research data of all types and sizes. This article presents a case study of the data storage, sharing, and management platform Figshare. We argue that such platforms are displacing and reconfiguring the infrastructure of norms, technologies, and institutions that underlies traditional scholarly communication. Using a theoretical framework that combines infrastructure studies with platform studies, we show that Figshare leverages the platform logic of core and complementary components to re-integrate a (...) presently splintered scholarly infrastructure. By means of this logic, platforms may provide the path to bring data inside a scholarly communication system still optimized mainly for text publications. Yet the platform strategy also risks turning over critical scientific functions to private firms whose longevity, openness, and corporate goals remain uncertain. It may amplify the existing trend of splintering infrastructures, with attendant effects on equity of service. (shrink)

In 2004, Google embarked on a massive book digitization project. Forty library partners and billions of scanned pages later, Google Book Search has provided searchable text access to millions of books. While many details of Google’s conversion processes remain proprietary secret, here we piece together their general outlines by closely examining Google Book Search products, Google patents, and the entanglement of libraries and computer scientists in the longer history of digitization work. We argue that far from simply “scanning” books, Google’s (...) efforts may be characterized as algorithmic digitization, strongly shaped by an equation of digital access with full-text searchability. We explore the consequences of Google’s algorithmic digitization system for what end users ultimately do and do not see, placing these effects in the context of the multiple technical, material, and legal challenges surrounding Google Book Search. By approaching digitization primarily as a text extraction and indexing challenge—an effort to convert print books into electronically searchable data—GBS enacts one possible future for books, in which they are defined largely by their textual content. (shrink)

This essay proposes a cultural and historical explanation for the American Military's fascination with computing. Three key elements of post-WWII US political culture — apocalyptic struggle with the USSR, subsuming all other conflicts: a long history of antimilitarist sentiment in American politics; and the rise of science-based military power — contributed to a sense of the world as a closed system accessible to American technological control. A developing scientific systems discourse, centrally including computer science and AI, was adopted for strategic (...) thinking and military technology. The Strategic Computing and Strategic Defense Initiatives are discussed as contemporary examples of this conjunction. (shrink)