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lines of work. Forms of automation, for instance, begin in one sphere and spread across lines of innovation and dependency. Scientists say that the natures of their disciplines are changing, in no small part due to these infrastructural shifts. Stephen Hawking in his inaugural lecture as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge (a post once held by Newton) expressed a belief that by the turn of the century, computers would essentially perform work in theoretical physics. Humans would not be able to understand the mathematics, but they could aspire to interpreting its consequences (Hawking 1980). Pure mathematicians have now adopted a method of existence proofs that would have been unmanageable before the development of the computer, such as the solution to the four-color problem. Not only the scientist and the mathematician are affected. Classical scholars had to learn a new set of techniques (dealing with complex searches on a computer) and indeed pose a new set of questions of their data when classical text became available on-line (Ruhleder 1995). The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae houses the complete canon of classical Greek literature in electronic form. Since its inception in the 1980s, classical scholars have changed their working practices, including the definition of text, the value of word searches, and the role of concordances. J. David Bolter, inter alia, has commented that genres of fiction, too, are undergoing radical change with the development of hypertext (Bolter 1991). And more generally, as Beniger (1986) amongst others reminds us, the structure of industry is changing such that "information work" has become the dominant mode of work in industrialized economies (Kling, Olin, and Poster 1991). |
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Among other things, these changes imply that the worlds of knowledge and of industry are not the same worlds after the development of this new information infrastructure as they were beforehand. To explain what has happened, the historian has to range freely between the "inside" (looking at knowledge within physics, mathematics, classics, and so forth) and the "outside" (looking at changes in work practice and information management that hold over many fields at once). |
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The story of information infrastructures is not, in this sense, the history of great people. Much of the work has been done offstage by communities of hackers, technicians, and engineers, and in maintenance, upgrades, and integration. Creating an infrastructure is as much social, political, and economic work as it is theoretical. Although in some sense knowledge is its raison d'être, it bursts the bounds of |
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