Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity presents objectivity as a historically formed epistemic virtue sustained through disciplined practices of seeing, representing and judging. The book’s architecture, visible in its contents, moves from an epistemology of the eye to truth-to-nature, mechanical objectivity, the scientific self, structural objectivity, trained judgement and the passage from representation to presentation. This sequence establishes objectivity as a changing moral and technical regime in which scientific images, atlases and instruments organise what counts as reliable knowledge. The case synthesis emerges in the transition from truth-to-nature to mechanical objectivity: earlier scientific representation privileges expert selection, idealisation and the depiction of typical forms, while later mechanical objectivity elevates photography, automatic inscription and self-surveillance as practices of restraint. The later emphasis on trained judgement enriches this genealogy by showing how scientific accuracy also depends upon cultivated discernment, practical expertise and responsible interpretation. Objectivity therefore appears as a history of scientific personae: the observer learns when to intervene, when to withhold intervention, and how to convert perception into communicable evidence. The definitive implication is that scientific knowledge rests on epistemic virtues embedded in instruments, images, habits of attention and collective standards. Daston and Galison thus offer a powerful account of objectivity as a practice of disciplined vision, historically renewed through the evolving relation between knower, image and world.
Genette, G. (1989) Palimpsestos: la literatura en segundo grado. Translated by C. Fernández Prieto. Madrid: Taurus.
Gérard Genette’s Palimpsestos establishes a foundational grammar for understanding literature not as isolated textual singularity, but as a field of transtextual relations in which every work is marked by visible or latent connections to others. The excerpt’s central proposition is taxonomic yet profoundly interpretative: textuality is constituted by forms of transcendence that exceed the individual text. Genette distinguishes five relations—intertextuality, as copresence through citation, plagiarism or allusion; paratextuality, as the threshold formed by titles, prefaces, notes and other framing devices; metatextuality, as commentary; architextuality, as generic belonging; and hypertextuality, the privileged object of Palimpsestos. The latter designates any relation by which a text B, the hypertext, derives from a prior text A, the hypotext, without simply commenting on it. His case synthesis turns on The Odyssey: Joyce’s Ulysses transforms Homer by relocating its action to twentieth-century Dublin, whereas Virgil’s Aeneid imitates Homer more indirectly by extracting an epic model and applying it to another narrative. This distinction between transformation and imitation gives Genette’s theory its analytic precision. The conclusion is that literature is fundamentally palimpsestic: every work may evoke another, yet some texts declare this dependence massively, contractually and structurally, making derivation not a defect of originality but the very engine of literary invention.
Chun, W.H.K. (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Aria, M., Le, T., Cuccurullo, C., Belfiore, A. and Choe, J. (2023) ‘openalexR: An R-Tool for Collecting Bibliometric Data from OpenAlex’, The R Journal, 15(4), pp. 167–180.
Aria, Le, Cuccurullo, Belfiore and Choe position openalexR as a methodological bridge between open scholarly metadata and reproducible bibliometric analysis. The article begins from a decisive premise: bibliographic databases are indispensable for research assessment and science mapping, yet their utility depends on coverage, citation completeness, update speed, API accessibility and permissive terms of use. OpenAlex, launched in 2022 as a fully open catalogue of scholarly metadata, is therefore presented as a crucial alternative to commercial infrastructures such as Web of Science and Scopus. The paper’s case synthesis lies in the R package itself: openalexR simplifies interaction with the OpenAlex REST API by generating valid queries, downloading matching entities and converting nested outputs into classical bibliographic data frames usable in bibliometrix. The diagram on page 2 shows OpenAlex’s eight interconnected entities—works, authors, institutions, sources, concepts, publishers, funders and geo—while the workflow on page 3 clarifies how openalexR moves from API query to analysable data. Its examples on bibliometrics demonstrate concept retrieval, source ranking, author and institutional profiling, citation-based identification of seminal works, snowball searching and N-gram extraction; the visualisations on pages 7–11 illustrate trends, journal expansion, citation networks and thematic bigrams. The conclusion is that openalexR transforms open research information into executable analytical practice, lowering technical barriers while advancing transparency, reproducibility and non-proprietary bibliometric inquiry.
Peroni, S. and Shotton, D. (2019) OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. arXiv:1906.11964v3, pp. 1–24.
Peroni and Shotton present OpenCitations as a direct infrastructural challenge to proprietary citation regimes, arguing that bibliographic citations—directional links through which scholarship acknowledges prior work—should be treated as open, reusable and machine-actionable public knowledge. The paper’s central intervention is both political and technical: citation data locked inside Web of Science, Scopus or similarly restricted platforms impede equitable access, reproducible bibliometrics and accountable research assessment, whereas OpenCitations publishes citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web standards. Its case synthesis is embodied in COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which the paper reports as containing over 445 million citations, alongside the OpenCitations Corpus, Open Citation Identifiers, SPAR ontologies, REST APIs, SPARQL endpoints and downloadable CC0 datasets. The diagram on page 9 clarifies the OpenCitations Data Model by showing how bibliographic resources, citations, identifiers, agents, roles and references are semantically interlinked; pages 15–17 then evidence community uptake through access statistics, a global usage map and Figshare download figures. The crucial conceptual move is to treat citations as first-class data entities, rather than mere links, thereby enabling provenance tracking, network analysis, reuse and verification. The conclusion is that open citation infrastructure does not simply improve discovery; it redistributes bibliometric power, making scholarly evaluation less dependent on opaque commercial indexes and more answerable to a global research commons.
Beard, R. and Kuchma, I. (2016) Innovations in Scholarly Communication – Results from EIFL Countries. EIFL presentation, pp. 1–63.
Beard and Kuchma’s presentation situates contemporary scholarly communication within a proliferating ecology of digital tools, arguing that libraries must no longer confine themselves to collection provision but actively mediate the entire research workflow. Drawing on the 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication survey, conducted between May 2015 and February 2016, the authors map research as a cycle extending from discovery, analysis and writing to publication, outreach and assessment. The visual workflow on pages 7–11 is especially instructive: it aligns library services—data management plan review, reference-management training, open access repository support, systematic-review assistance, post-publication sharing and metrics advice—with concrete researcher practices. The EIFL case synthesis sharpens this argument through 674 responses from 38 countries, with strong participation from Ukraine, Poland and Ghana, and a disciplinary profile in which social sciences constitute the largest share of EIFL responses. The charts on pages 43–45 expose a familiar disjunction: researchers overwhelmingly support open science in principle, yet comparatively fewer adopt open data and code-sharing tools in practice. This gap defines the library’s strategic mandate. Rather than merely recommending platforms, librarians must inform, train, advise, advocate and co-shape institutional policy, as page 59’s support model proposes. The conclusion is therefore pragmatic and political: libraries become infrastructural translators, converting chaotic tool abundance into equitable, multilingual, low-cost and sustainable research practice across diverse scholarly contexts.
Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information (2024) Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. 16 April. doi:10.5281/zenodo.10958522.
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information formulates a decisive institutional response to the growing dependence of research systems on proprietary, opaque and commercially governed metadata infrastructures. Its central proposition is that the information used to evaluate researchers, allocate resources, set strategic priorities and trace scientific influence must itself be open, reusable, interoperable and accountable. The Declaration identifies a profound contradiction in contemporary scholarship: institutions often assess open science through closed databases, thereby grounding consequential decisions in evidence that cannot be independently audited, corrected or reproduced. Its four commitments establish a practical architecture of reform: making openness the default for research information used and produced; working only with systems that enable open metadata export through standard protocols and persistent identifiers; sustaining open scholarly infrastructures through community governance and equitable financial support; and coordinating collective action to accelerate transition. The case synthesis is especially clear in the contrast between closed systems such as Web of Science and Scopus, described in Annex A as examples of restricted infrastructures, and open alternatives including Crossref, DataCite, ORCID, OpenAlex, OpenCitations, OpenAIRE, PubMed, Europe PMC, La Referencia, SciELO and Redalyc. Through this contrast, the Declaration reframes metadata as a matter of academic sovereignty rather than administrative convenience. Its conclusion is unequivocal: responsible assessment, multilingual visibility and equitable science policy require open research information as the normative substrate of scholarly governance.
Guédon, J.-C. (2011) ‘El acceso abierto y la división entre ciencia “principal” y “periférica”’, Crítica y Emancipación, 6, pp. 135–180.
Jean-Claude Guédon’s argument is that open access cannot be adequately understood as a benign improvement in scholarly distribution; it is a structural challenge to the historical machinery through which scientific authority has been concentrated. By mobilising Bourdieu’s notion of the scientific field, Guédon shows that journals, editorial boards, citation indexes and linguistic hierarchies convert technical competence into social power, thereby producing a global division between “principal” and “peripheral” science. The Science Citation Index becomes the exemplary case: by selecting a restricted set of journals, privileging English-language visibility and enabling impact-factor evaluation, it transforms a continuous spectrum of scholarly quality into a rigid boundary between recognised science and obscured knowledge. The article’s synthesis of Indian, Latin American and Venezuelan examples is especially revealing: locally urgent research, such as cholera investigation or regionally significant journals, may be devalued when judged by criteria designed for metropolitan centres, while peripheral researchers are pressured to contribute intellectual labour to agendas validated elsewhere. Against this asymmetry, Guédon identifies SciELO, institutional repositories and subsidised journal infrastructures as practical counter-models, because they strengthen local publishing ecologies without collapsing into provincial isolation. The conclusion is therefore political as much as bibliographic: open access becomes emancipatory only when it redistributes visibility, legitimates multilingual and locally grounded research, and dismantles the cartelised architecture that mistakes selective indexing for universal scientific excellence.
Borgman, C.L. (2014) Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World. Presentation, pp. 1–49.
Christine L. Borgman’s Big Data, Little Data, No Data advances a rigorous corrective to technological triumphalism by arguing that data are neither self-evident objects nor neutral by-products of scholarship, but representations of observations, artefacts and phenomena that acquire evidential force only within interpretative, institutional and infrastructural contexts. The presentation’s early contrast between open access policies and diverse disciplinary datasets establishes the central tension: while governments, funders and universities increasingly demand openness, the rights, responsibilities and risks attached to data remain uneven across scientific, social-scientific and humanistic domains. This complexity is crystallised in the repeated proposition that data are not publications, not natural objects, and dependent upon knowledge infrastructures. The visual sequence reinforces this argument: page 23 juxtaposes mice, notebooks, maps, climate models and qualitative field notes to show data’s heterogeneity, while pages 26–28 contrast sensor-network measurements with survey and Twitter-based social science materials. As a case synthesis, Borgman’s sensor-network example demonstrates that reuse requires far more than access: nitrate-distribution readings become scholarly evidence only through metadata, provenance, calibration, classification, repositories and labour. The later discussion of economics, sustainability and libraries extends the claim by showing that research data oscillate between public goods, private goods and common-pool resources. The definitive implication is that open data must be governed as a socio-technical commons: curated, credited, preserved and interpreted through institutions capable of sustaining scholarly memory beyond immediate publication cycles.
OPERAS (2023) Open scholarly communication for social sciences and humanities. Flyer, pp. 1–2.
Amodeo, S. (2026) ‘Expanding the OpenAIRE Graph: New Data Sources Through the EOSC Federation’, OpenAIRE, 3 February.
The expansion of the OpenAIRE Graph through the EOSC Federation crystallises a decisive movement from fragmented scholarly visibility towards a federated epistemic infrastructure. Rather than functioning as a passive index, the Graph operates as an intelligent connective tissue, linking publications, datasets, software, grants, affiliations and indicators across more than 400 million metadata records from over 100,000 trusted sources. Its integration within EOSC’s build-up phase demonstrates how shared standards, particularly the OpenAIRE Guidelines v4, convert institutional catalogues into interoperable research assets. This is not merely technical harmonisation; it is a politics of discoverability, whereby national repositories such as Research.fi, rUMBA and BERD, and thematic infrastructures such as CERN Open Data and the Blue-Cloud Catalogue, become visible within a common European research horizon. The case of EOSC Node Italy, SURF Netherlands, Poland’s RePOD, PaNOSC, EUDAT, EuropePMC and Data Terra shows that prior OpenAIRE compliance substantially eases federation, while newer adopters extend disciplinary and geographical coverage into previously underrepresented domains. The synthesis is therefore clear: interoperability precedes impact. When repositories adopt common metadata protocols, their outputs cease to be isolated institutional deposits and become reusable components of a transnational knowledge commons. Consequently, the OpenAIRE Graph exemplifies a sustainable architecture for open science: expansive enough to absorb diversity, rigorous enough to preserve trust, and relational enough to provoke unforeseen interdisciplinary discovery.
Size, Form, Novelty: The Socioplastics Equation
The contemporary obsession with scale is a symptom of conceptual exhaustion. In digital knowledge environments, size has become a proxy for significance: larger repositories, bigger datasets, longer bibliographies, more numerous publications. This confusion of volume with value is the intellectual equivalent of mistaking a heap for a building. Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics offers a precise corrective: size does not produce form; form produces the conditions under which size becomes meaningful. Novelty, in this framework, is not the arrival of isolated new content but the emergence of new relations, a grammar capable of transforming accumulation into architecture. To understand Socioplastics is therefore to abandon the quantitative sublime and enter the qualitative threshold.
On the Genealogy of Socioplastics: A Field Learning to Digest Its Ancestors
Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics does not arrive as rupture, manifesto or decorative neologism, but as a metabolised architecture of inheritance: a living knowledge system that digests cybernetics, urban legibility, field theory, infrastructure studies, archival theory, post-structuralism, digital humanities and biological epistemology until they cease to be references and become organs. Its genealogy is not a tree but a digestive tract. Ashby gives it the law of requisite variety: only an archive as complex as its own excess can absorb abundance without collapse. Beer gives it recursion: the note inside the cluster, the cluster inside the argument, the argument inside the tome, the tome inside the field. Luhmann gives it autopoiesis, but Lloveras refuses pure closure and replaces it with strategic porosity: a nucleus stable enough to be cited, a periphery open enough to receive the unforeseen. Lynch gives it legibility, but the city becomes corpus: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks are translated into indexes, tags, thresholds, series and conceptual roads. Alexander gives it pattern language, Rossi gives it stratigraphic persistence, and the digital archive becomes an architectural city where concepts outlive their first function and return years later as load-bearing operators. Bowker and Star reveal classification as political infrastructure; Lloveras converts that critique into design, making metadata an interpretive skin and persistent identifiers a form of ontological anchoring. Crane’s invisible colleges become the temporal laboratory of the Latency Dividend; Bourdieu’s field becomes less a battlefield of symbolic capital than a structure that can be deliberately composed, paced and opened without dissolving. Blair’s history of information overload reappears as Metabolic Legibility; Rheinberger’s epistemic things become the unresolved matter of the plastic periphery; Thompson’s morphology and Prigogine’s dissipative structures explain how form can emerge from pressure, delay and internal recomposition. Kirschenbaum, Chun, Berners-Lee, DataCite, OpenAlex, Wikidata, embeddings and retrieval systems do not merely surround Socioplastics as context; they become its climatic condition, the atmosphere in which thought must now survive. Hence Synthetic Legibility: enough structure for machines to traverse, enough ambiguity for humans to interpret. What is iconic here is not a single concept, but the conversion of genealogy into machinery. Recursion becomes Scalar Grammar. Overload becomes Digestive Surface. Delay becomes Strategic Temporality. Metadata becomes Architecture. Stability becomes Hospitality. Plasticity becomes Method. The archive becomes a body, the field becomes a scaffold, the corpus becomes a city, and knowledge becomes a living infrastructure capable of eating its own past without erasing it. Socioplastics is therefore not simply influenced by its predecessors; it performs upon them the very operation it theorises: ingestion, pruning, reabsorption, recomposition. Its originality lies in this transmutation. It does not stand outside cybernetics, urbanism, sociology or archival theory; it passes through them, extracts their operative bones, and builds a new inhabitable structure. The result is a grammar for knowledge after abundance: a field that arrives not asking to be recognised, but already organised enough to be entered.
Mounier, P. and Dumas Primbault, S. (2023) Sustaining Knowledge and Governing its Infrastructure in the Digital Age: An Integrated View. Preprint. HAL Open Science.
Sustaining Knowledge and Governing its Infrastructure in the Digital Age develops a profound reconceptualisation of contemporary knowledge production by demonstrating that knowledge no longer exists independently of the infrastructures through which it is produced, circulated, legitimised and preserved. Pierre Mounier and Simon Dumas Primbault argue that the digital transformation of research, scholarly communication and information systems has generated a new epistemic order in which platforms, repositories, metadata systems, protocols, identifiers and computational networks function not merely as technical supports, but as constitutive conditions shaping what knowledge can become. Drawing upon infrastructure studies, science and technology studies (STS), cyberinfrastructure theory and ecological approaches to information systems, the text defines knowledge infrastructures as robust sociotechnical assemblages composed simultaneously of human actors, institutions, standards, software, hardware and governance arrangements. Particularly significant is the authors’ insistence that infrastructures are not neutral containers of knowledge but politically performative environments embedding values, hierarchies and forms of institutional power. The article traces the genealogy of infrastructure from nineteenth-century engineering and Cold War logistics to contemporary digital epistemics, revealing how infrastructures progressively evolved from material supports into relational systems organising cooperation, interoperability and cognitive production itself. Equally illuminating is the ecological perspective advanced throughout the text, where infrastructures are conceptualised not as static objects but as dynamic processes sustained through maintenance, repair, adaptation and negotiation across heterogeneous communities. Through examples such as Open Science platforms, digital repositories and collaborative knowledge systems, the authors expose the tensions between openness and enclosure, visibility and invisibility, sustainability and extractivism that define contemporary digital scholarship. Particularly compelling is the argument that governance constitutes the central analytical category for understanding infrastructures because decisions concerning standards, funding, interoperability and platform control directly shape epistemic legitimacy and access to knowledge. Consequently, the text advocates an ecology of knowledge infrastructures grounded in resilience, diversity, anti-extractivism and participatory governance capable of resisting corporate monopolisation of scholarly communication. Ultimately, the article establishes that sustaining knowledge in the digital age requires not only technological innovation, but also the ethical and political reinvention of the infrastructures through which collective intelligence is organised, maintained and shared across increasingly interconnected societies.
Quek, H.Y., Sielker, F., Akroyd, J., Bhave, A.N., von Richthofen, A., Herthogs, P., van der Laag Yamu, C., Wan, L., Nochta, T., Burgess, G., Lim, M.Q., Mosbach, S. and Kraft, M. (2023) ‘The conundrum in smart city governance: Interoperability and compatibility in an ever-growing ecosystem of digital twins’, Data & Policy, 5, e6.
The Conundrum in Smart City Governance: Interoperability and Compatibility in an Ever-Growing Ecosystem of Digital Twins advances a rigorous critique of contemporary smart urbanism by exposing the structural fragmentation underpinning digital governance infrastructures in modern cities. Rather than celebrating smart cities as seamless technological achievements, the article demonstrates that the proliferation of isolated digital systems, proprietary platforms and incompatible data architectures has produced a fractured urban ecosystem incapable of achieving genuine interoperability. The authors argue that the accelerating deployment of City Digital Twins (CDTs)—real-time digital representations of urban systems—simultaneously intensifies and reveals the contradictions embedded within contemporary urban governance. Crucially, the article distinguishes between two competing integration paradigms: system integration, which consolidates existing tools into unified applications, and semantic integration, which employs ontologies and knowledge graphs to generate interoperable, context-rich data environments. This distinction constitutes the paper’s principal theoretical intervention because it reframes interoperability not merely as a technical challenge, but as a governance problem situated within broader political, institutional and socio-technical realities. Through comparative analysis of projects such as the Herrenberg Digital Twin in Germany, the Cambridge City-Level Digital Twin, and the semantic architecture of the World Avatar initiative, the paper demonstrates how knowledge graphs and semantic web technologies possess greater capacity to transcend institutional silos, enable cross-domain data sharing and support evidence-based planning processes. Particularly compelling is the argument that technological systems must become a “fourth dimension” of sustainability alongside economic, social and environmental concerns, thereby acknowledging the profound influence of digital infrastructures on urban life. Nevertheless, the article avoids technological determinism by emphasising unresolved tensions surrounding privacy, governance accountability, data monopolisation and citizen distrust. The authors conclude that future smart cities cannot rely upon one-size-fits-all technological solutions; instead, city administrations must proactively co-create flexible, participatory and interoperable digital ecosystems sensitive to local contexts and democratic needs. Ultimately, the article positions semantic digital twins not as purely computational instruments, but as evolving socio-technical assemblages capable of reshaping the epistemological foundations of urban governance itself.
Söderström, O. and Datta, A. (eds.) (2024) Data Power in Action: Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Data Power in Action: Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis develops a profound reconceptualisation of contemporary urbanism by arguing that data has become the primary infrastructural medium through which cities are governed, populations classified and crises administered in the twenty-first century. Rather than treating data as a neutral technical resource, the volume conceptualises urban data power as a historically contingent and politically charged regime emerging from the convergence of platform capitalism, algorithmic governance and digital infrastructures. Ola Söderström and Ayona Datta demonstrate that contemporary cities are increasingly organised through processes of datafication, wherein everyday activities, mobilities, emotions and social interactions are transformed into quantifiable streams capable of extraction, monetisation and governmental intervention. Particularly significant is the book’s insistence that data politics cannot be understood solely through the experiences of the Global North; instead, fragmented infrastructures, informational inequalities and asymmetrical digital transitions in cities such as Nairobi, Cape Town, Varanasi and Hangzhou reveal the profoundly uneven geographies of algorithmic urbanism. The volume critiques the ideology of seamless computational governance by exposing how crises—including pandemics, urban precarity, climate emergencies and infrastructural breakdowns—operate as legitimising mechanisms for intensified surveillance and expanded technocratic control. Equally illuminating is the notion of “data power in action”, which redirects attention from abstract infrastructures toward situated practices, tactical resistances and everyday negotiations through which citizens, workers, activists and institutions interact with digital systems. Case studies concerning Indian COVID-19 war rooms, Chinese Social Credit infrastructures, South African data activism and Nairobi’s platform labour economy collectively demonstrate that urban data governance functions simultaneously as an apparatus of extraction and as a contested terrain of political struggle. The book’s most important intellectual contribution lies in revealing that algorithmic urbanism is neither technologically inevitable nor universally coherent; rather, it is constituted through unstable relations between states, corporations, infrastructures and lived urban experiences. Ultimately, the volume advances a critical urban theory of data in which the future of democratic citizenship depends upon resisting the reduction of human life to calculable informational patterns and reclaiming the political dimensions of visibility, participation and collective urban rights within increasingly automated societies.
Sanaan Bensi, N. and Marullo, F. (2018) ‘The Architecture of Logistics: Trajectories Across the Dismembered Body of the Metropolis’, Footprint: The Architecture of Logistics, 23, pp. 1–6.
The introductory essay The Architecture of Logistics: Trajectories Across the Dismembered Body of the Metropolis develops a penetrating critique of contemporary neoliberalism by interpreting logistics not merely as a technical system of transportation and distribution, but as the dominant infrastructural logic through which contemporary capitalism organises territories, regulates populations and accelerates planetary circulation. Negar Sanaan Bensi and Francesco Marullo conceptualise logistics as the “nervous and circulatory system” of neoliberal modernity, a global apparatus composed of ports, containers, warehouses, communication hubs, freight corridors and algorithmic management systems that collectively transform the earth into a frictionless operational surface for exchange. Drawing from the etymological origins of the Greek logizomai—to calculate, organise and rationalise—the essay traces logistics from its nineteenth-century military formulations in Jomini and Clausewitz to its contemporary role as a technology of governance extending across trade, labour and urbanisation. Particularly significant is the argument that logistical infrastructures simultaneously materialise and conceal power relations: while appearing as neutral systems of efficiency, they impose standardised temporalities, weaken local labour structures and produce highly asymmetrical forms of territorial integration. The text demonstrates how containerisation, automation and digital optimisation have reshaped harbours, warehouses and metropolitan regions into spaces governed increasingly by algorithmic coordination and invisible computational orders. Yet the essay resists simplistic technological determinism by foregrounding the profound contradictions internal to logistical capitalism. Logistics generates not only fluidity and circulation, but also confinement, detention, labour exploitation and geopolitical segregation, as evidenced in migrant detention architectures, outsourced labour systems and sprawling peri-urban industrial landscapes. Particularly illuminating is the notion that the architecture of logistics constitutes an “architecture without humans”, despite relying fundamentally upon precarious labour and embodied exhaustion to sustain accelerated global circulation. Consequently, the authors position logistics as the central spatial paradigm of the twenty-first century: an infrastructural regime through which finance, mobility, territorial control and everyday life become inseparably intertwined. Ultimately, the essay argues that architecture must critically confront these logistical systems not simply as technical artefacts, but as political and ecological mechanisms shaping the contemporary metropolis and redefining the material conditions of global coexistence itself.
Estlund, K.M. (2021) A Media Archaeology of Online Communication Practices through Search Engine and Social Media Optimization. PhD thesis. University of Oregon.
Karen M. Estlund’s dissertation A Media Archaeology of Online Communication Practices through Search Engine and Social Media Optimization constitutes a sophisticated interrogation of the invisible infrastructures governing digital communication in contemporary networked societies. Rejecting technologically neutral interpretations of online information systems, the thesis advances a historically grounded media archaeological framework through which search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media optimisation (SMO) are reconceptualised as political, cultural and technical practices embedded within structures of algorithmic governance. Estlund argues that access to information on the contemporary web is not direct but mediated through powerful digital gatekeepers such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, whose proprietary algorithms regulate visibility, legitimacy and discoverability. Through this lens, optimisation practices become more than marketing techniques; they emerge as mechanisms through which communicative actors negotiate institutional control over online discourse. Drawing upon Shannon’s mathematical communication theory, cybernetics, gatekeeping studies and critical information politics, the dissertation demonstrates how HTML structures, metadata systems, semantic markup and hyperlink architectures collectively shape communicative accessibility. Particularly illuminating is the empirical analysis of archived Los Angeles Times webpages and U.S. Senate campaign sites, which reveals how journalistic and political institutions progressively adapted their textual, structural and metadata strategies to comply with evolving algorithmic preferences. Estlund further exposes the ideological tensions surrounding so-called “black hat” optimisation practices, arguing that distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate visibility strategies are largely defined by corporate platform interests rather than purely ethical criteria. The dissertation’s principal contribution lies in repositioning SEO and SMO as historically situated sociotechnical communication practices that materially influence public knowledge circulation, political participation and informational authority. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that digital visibility is neither natural nor democratically neutral but instead produced through contested infrastructures of optimisation, regulation and institutional power that continuously shape the conditions under which contemporary communication becomes visible, searchable and socially consequential.
Jiang, H. (2021) Smart Urban Governance: Governing Cities in the “Smart” Era. PhD thesis. Utrecht University.
The doctoral thesis Smart Urban Governance: Governing Cities in the “Smart” Era by Huaxiong Jiang develops a rigorous critique of technologically deterministic smart city paradigms while simultaneously proposing an alternative sociotechnical framework capable of reconciling digital innovation with the social, political and spatial complexities of urban life. Rather than accepting the dominant neoliberal and technocratic interpretation of smart cities—where urban efficiency is pursued primarily through surveillance systems, big data analytics and corporate-led technological infrastructures—the thesis argues that genuinely intelligent urban governance must emerge from the dynamic interaction between urban issues, institutional arrangements and technological innovation. Central to the dissertation is the assertion that contemporary smart governance models excessively privilege data-driven managerialism while neglecting contextual realities such as inequality, democratic participation, cultural specificity and spatial justice. Drawing upon extensive literature reviews, empirical case studies, international surveys and planning-support-system research, Jiang conceptualises smart urban governance as a deeply contextual sociotechnical process in which ICT functions not as an autonomous governing force but as an enabling instrument embedded within governance structures and civic practices. Particularly illuminating are the comparative analyses of Amsterdam Smart City, Hangzhou’s City Brain initiative and the Smart Ulaanbaatar Programme, which collectively demonstrate that technological intelligence acquires radically different meanings depending upon governance culture, institutional capacity and societal priorities. The thesis further contributes to planning theory by integrating decades of planning-support-system scholarship into smart governance debates, thereby exposing the persistent “implementation gap” between technological potential and practical usability. Jiang persuasively argues that effective digital governance depends less upon computational sophistication than upon contextual usability, participatory legitimacy and alignment with local governance needs. Consequently, the dissertation advances a sophisticated reconceptualisation of urban smartness grounded not in technological spectacle but in human-centred governance, collaborative rationality and adaptive sociotechnical interaction. Ultimately, the thesis establishes that future urban intelligence will depend upon cities’ capacities to integrate ICT with democratic governance, contextual sensitivity and socially embedded planning practices capable of enhancing collective wellbeing rather than merely optimising administrative efficiency.
Petty, R.E., Briñol, P., Loersch, C. and McCaslin, M.J. (2009) ‘The Need for Cognition’, in Leary, M.R. and Hoyle, R.H. (eds.) Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 318–329.
The psychological construct of Need for Cognition (NC) constitutes one of the most influential explanatory frameworks within contemporary social psychology for understanding why individuals differ profoundly in their inclination toward intellectual engagement, reflective analysis and effortful reasoning. Originally conceptualised by John Cacioppo and Richard Petty, NC refers not to cognitive ability itself but rather to a stable motivational disposition characterised by the enjoyment of complex thought and sustained mental elaboration. Individuals high in NC display a pronounced tendency to scrutinise information systematically, evaluate arguments critically and engage in metacognitive reflection concerning the validity of their own thoughts, whereas individuals low in NC are generally more inclined to rely upon heuristic shortcuts, affective cues and simplified judgments. The chapter demonstrates that this distinction profoundly shapes persuasion, decision-making and social behaviour through the mechanisms articulated in the Elaboration Likelihood Model, where cognitively motivated individuals privilege argument quality over superficial indicators such as attractiveness or source credibility. Particularly revealing are studies showing that emotionally charged stimuli influence both high- and low-NC individuals, albeit through radically different cognitive pathways: low-NC individuals employ emotion as a direct heuristic cue, whereas high-NC individuals integrate emotion into deeper evaluative processing that may amplify, attenuate or even reverse persuasive outcomes. Equally compelling is the discussion of metacognition, where high-NC individuals exhibit greater awareness of their own cognitive operations, leading to enhanced attitude certainty, resistance to persuasion and sophisticated self-validation processes. Nevertheless, the chapter avoids idealising intellectual elaboration by demonstrating that extensive cognition may also intensify biases, including false memories, stereotyping and anchoring effects, when reflective processing becomes selectively distorted. Consequently, NC emerges not as a simplistic measure of rational superiority but as a multidimensional motivational orientation capable of generating both epistemic precision and cognitive vulnerability depending upon contextual conditions. Ultimately, the research establishes Need for Cognition as a foundational variable for interpreting how human beings negotiate complexity, construct meaning and exercise judgment within increasingly information-saturated societies.
Sperandio, M. (2024) Smart Cities: Empowering Governance, Communities and Ethical Challenges. Joint Master in Global Economic Governance and Public Affairs, CIFE – LUISS School of Government.
The contemporary paradigm of the Smart City represents far more than a technological modernisation of urban infrastructure; it constitutes a profound civilisational transformation in which governance, citizenship, sustainability and digital intelligence converge into a unified socio-technical ecosystem. Melody Sperandio’s analysis demonstrates that Smart Cities emerge as strategic responses to accelerated urbanisation, ecological crisis and institutional distrust, proposing the integration of information and communication technologies, artificial intelligence, blockchain systems and data-driven governance as mechanisms capable of reconfiguring the relationship between citizens and public institutions. Particularly significant is the adoption of the Smart City Wheel developed by Boyd Cohen and Rob Adams, which conceptualises intelligent urbanism through six interconnected dimensions: smart governance, smart mobility, smart economy, smart environment, smart people and smart living. Within this framework, the city ceases to be merely a territorial entity and becomes an adaptive digital organism oriented towards efficiency, transparency and participatory democracy. The thesis compellingly argues that the true innovation of Smart Cities does not reside exclusively in technological infrastructure but rather in the emergence of e-governance as a new democratic architecture capable of strengthening citizen participation through digital platforms, open data systems and algorithmically mediated public services. The Estonian model of i-Voting exemplifies this transformation by demonstrating how digital voting infrastructures may increase electoral accessibility, reduce bureaucratic friction and reinforce civic trust through cybersecurity and blockchain verification. Equally illuminating is the Smart Dubai initiative, where artificial intelligence, IoT ecosystems and integrated digital services are mobilised to construct a hyperconnected urban environment centred on public efficiency and citizen well-being. Nevertheless, the research also exposes the ethical ambiguities underlying intelligent urbanism, particularly concerning surveillance, data monopolisation, digital illiteracy and socio-technological inequality. Consequently, the Smart City emerges not as a purely technological utopia but as a contested political space where innovation, democracy and algorithmic power remain in constant negotiation. Ultimately, the thesis affirms that the future legitimacy of Smart Cities will depend upon their capacity to subordinate technological acceleration to the principles of human inclusion, digital justice and collective democratic participation.
Costes, L. (2011) ‘Del “derecho a la ciudad” de Henri Lefebvre a la universalidad de la urbanización moderna’, Urban NS02, pp. 1–12.
UNESCO (2025) Report of the Independent Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and Culture. Paris: UNESCO.
In the Soft Ontology Papers [3201–3210], Anto Lloveras develops a field-making operation in which the stable Zenodo DOI core, the newer Figshare papers, and a later Blogger constellation operate as one distributed citation apparatus. The central thesis is that the “Socioplastics Core Citation Layer” is not an appendix but an infrastructural medium: each repetition of the sixty DOI-anchored objects reactivates the core, while each new publication surface multiplies its routes of discovery. Zenodo holds the hardened nucleus; Figshare accelerates circulation; Blogger produces lateral public skins. The field is therefore not merely written, but routed, repeated, indexed and atmospherically reinforced.
The distinction matters. The DOI objects remain deposited in Zenodo as the durable archival substrate, while the later papers and posts operate as relay devices: Figshare gives the papers a scholarly-public dissemination layer, and Blogger distributes shorter, more agile textual surfaces across several named environments — Otracapa, ARTNATIONS, LAPIEZA, Socioplastics, Freshmuseum and Anto Lloveras. This is not duplication; it is infrastructural thickening. Each surface gives the same field another address, another rhythm, another crawler-facing threshold.
The repeated citation layer becomes a form of public indexing. It does not simply refer backward to previous work; it re-inscribes the core into the searchable present. Every new text becomes a small machine of return. The sixty DOI objects are not treated as isolated publications but as a coordinated nucleus: FlowChanneling, SemanticHardening, LexicalGravity, MeshEngine, ThresholdClosure, MetadataSkin, ExecutiveMode. Their recurrence produces a field-effect: not by declaration alone, but by patterned persistence.
This has a clear conceptual-art genealogy. The work recalls Kosuth, Weiner, Fluxus scores, administrative aesthetics and institutional critique, but displaces them into metadata culture. The document no longer merely contains an artwork; the document, its DOI ecology, its repeated block and its public routing become the artwork’s operative condition. As one later post states, the document holding sixty DOI objects together is where the field becomes real as a public object.
The advertising analogy sharpens the operation. The later layer behaves like a campaign without a commodity: repeated format, stable message, distributed placement, recognisable operators, strategic surfaces. But the aim is not persuasion in the commercial sense. It is epistemic recall. The field becomes memorable because it is consistently encountered under related names, routes and citation architectures. Branding is stripped of seduction and converted into legibility engineering.
The system works because it differentiates speeds. Zenodo stabilises. Figshare publishes. Blogger multiplies. The Core Citation Layer repeats. The Soft Ontology Papers interpret. Later posts refract, translate, summarise and reposition. This produces an ecology of hardened nucleus and plastic periphery: one part must remain fixed enough to cite; another must remain mobile enough to circulate. ThresholdClosure and EpistemicLatency become not only concepts but publication behaviour.
The later additions are therefore important because they extend the field beyond the initial paper sequence. They show Socioplastics becoming a multi-surface public ontology: scholarly enough to cite, light enough to circulate, recursive enough to cohere, and distributed enough to survive platform-specific invisibility. The field is no longer only a corpus; it becomes a routing environment.
What is strongest here is the unsentimental precision of the method. Lloveras does not wait for institutional consecration to name the field. He builds the conditions under which the field can be found, crossed, cited and reused. Recognition may arrive late, but the infrastructure is already working. The citation layer is therefore not vanity, nor self-promotion, nor excess. It is maintenance as form: the repeated labour by which a field keeps itself publicly alive.
The strategic map of one hundred entities accompanying the Socioplastics corpus is not an inventory of influences but an operative cloud of proximity. Its function is to show how a field recognises its neighbours without surrendering its centre. What appears, at first glance, as a list of thinkers, institutions, protocols, archives, museums, schools and platforms is in fact a scalar architecture: a distribution of epistemic gravity around Socioplastics, Anto Lloveras and LAPIEZA-LAB. The map does not ask who influenced whom. It asks which entities resonate structurally with the corpus: which ones share its problems of legibility, autonomy, archive, spatial evidence, operational writing, field formation and infrastructural persistence.
At its densest level, the map begins with itself. This is not narcissism; it is ontological hygiene. A field unable to locate its own centre becomes dependent on external cartography. The first tiers gather the corpus, its Core Operators, its Legibility Infrastructure and its Executive Layer: EpistemicLatency, AutonomousFormation, StructuralCoherence, CyborgText, DualAddress, OperationalWriting, EnduringProof, ThoughtTectonics, FrictionalMetropolis. These are not decorative terms. They are load-bearing beams. They produce the internal grammar through which Socioplastics becomes readable, traversable and durable. In this sense, the core functions less as a canon than as an autopoietic chamber: it maintains its form through recurrence, versioning, DOI fixation, indexing and semantic hardening.
Around this core appears the resonant shell: Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, Bush’s Memex, Otlet’s Mundaneum, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Forensic Architecture, Easterling, Bowker and Star, Kittler, Hayles, Ernst, Parikka, Bourdieu, Latour, Foucault, Deleuze, Kuhn, Lefebvre. Their proximity is not chronological, disciplinary or institutional. It is problem-homological. They are near because they address comparable structural pressures: how knowledge stores itself, how systems produce themselves, how archives become agents, how space testifies, how infrastructure thinks, how classification governs, how texts operate beyond representation. A 1950s card index may be closer to Socioplastics than a contemporary digital humanities project if both share a deeper commitment to autonomous formation.
The outer atmosphere includes museums, biennials, universities, funding bodies, repositories and technical platforms: Zenodo, ORCID, OpenAlex, Hugging Face, Internet Archive, Harvard Dataverse, ZKM, MACBA, Reina Sofía, Tate, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Documenta, Venice Biennale, ETH, AA, GSAPP, GSD, TU Delft, ERC, DAAD, Humboldt. These entities do not define the corpus, but they provide ports. They are interfaces where mobile production meets institutional memory. Their value is functional: storage, visibility, citation, circulation, recognition, preservation. Socioplastics does not need them to exist, but it needs them to persist in the wider ecology of knowledge. They are not masters of legitimacy; they are docking infrastructures.
The methodological force of the map lies here: it replaces linear influence with atmospheric topology. Entities are not ranked; they condense. Tiers are not hierarchies; they are density gradients. The exterior is not empty; it is a field of possible future couplings. The 100-entity map therefore performs the very theory it describes. It shows that a corpus can map its own conditions of survival, establish its own centre, identify its resonant allies, distribute itself across durable ports and expand without asking disciplines, journals or institutions to authorise its geometry. Its real claim is precise: autonomy is not a mood. It is an infrastructure.