NSFNET to Cyberinfrastructure: Polity, Path Dependence, and Scientific Practice

The current efforts in “building cyberinfrastructure” are being met with varied success in different disciplines. With respect to the social sciences, cyberinfrastructure (CI) is a tool of significant potential for advancing research, both in terms of connecting social scientists, as well as making accessible vast stores of research data. The current focus of CI, however, is apposite for only a small segment of social scientific efforts. This research approaches CI from a historiographic and STS perspective, examining the development of CI from the early days of NSFNET and Advanced Systems and Networks (ANS). The consequences of particular decisions motivated by political, social, and economic factors created path dependencies gave rise to the current configuration of CI, and consequently define the types of science that most benefit from the CI environment.