Much recent work on cyberinfrastructure or e–science, by the National Science Foundation and others, has emphasized its newness. In such accounts, cyberinfrastructure is about new ways of organizing the practice of science, drawing on new computational resources, enabling new collaborative and organizational forms, and ultimately new forms of discovery and learning. There is undoubtedly much to recommend this framing, and none of what follows is intended to refute it. But it is also possible to place cyberinfrastructure on a different timeline (that of the “long now,” explained below) and in a different category (that of general infrastructure) in which the emphasis is not on novelty but continuity and consistency with the past. Doing so has certain advantages, not least of which is to open up a terrain of comparative learning which we believe can help guide policy and practice around the making of cyberinfrastructure. That, roughly, is the strategy of this paper.

The theoretical approaches, examples, and some of the arguments offered here draw heavily from the field of science and technology studies (STS), building on what are now several decades of work in the sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, communication and governance of science and technology. More immediately, they reflect the findings of an NSF–sponsored workshop, “History and Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures,” organized by the authors in Ann Arbor, Michigan during fall 2006. Many of the examples and arguments advanced here may be found in more developed form in the final workshop report, Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design . As the workshop and later report argued, while historical and comparative studies of infrastructure are unlikely to deliver anything as neat as a blueprint for action, they can — and indeed should — shape and guide thinking about present efforts at infrastructural development, in the sciences as elsewhere. This at least is what we have sought to wrest from historical and comparative study: not rules, but heuristics; not a map, but principles of navigation.

There are three main purposes of this paper: first, to argue for the ongoing relevance of history, even (and perhaps especially) in the context of seemingly revolutionary or history–breaking technologies; second, to point to some of the specific lessons that parallel efforts at infrastructure building, both past and present, can offer us; and third, to begin to distill from these some rough heuristics, or “rules for the road,” that present–day cyberinfrastructure developers and users might do well to keep in mind as they go about their work.