Virtual Information Infrastructures: The data centre as infrastructurer of natural and epistemic processes (A02)

• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 470106373

As information infrastructures data centres contribute to shaping scientific knowledge production. As consumers of natural resources and energy they intervene into natural processes. The ethnographic study of research project A02 combines research of the interdependency of socio-technical practices in a university data centre and scientific data practices with an ethnography of the value-chain from extraction of natural resources and energy production to the operation and use of the data centre. It thereby answers the theoretical as well as empirical question of the continuity between nature and knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1567: Virtuelle Lebenswelten
• Applicant Institution: Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• Project Head: Professorin Estrid Sørensen, Ph.D.