Brad Fidler and I are organizing a panel at next year's 4S meetings (August 29 - September 1, 2018) that discusses new digital research infrastructures for STS and conceptualizes possibilities for new collaborations between STS researchers and computer scientists. Please consider submitting an abstract by February 1, 2018 here <https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s18/>. 4S 2018 Sydney, Australia August 29 – September 1, 2018 *Theme*: TRANSnational STS *Panel: Research Infrastructures, Digital Tools and New Directions in STS Research* *Organizers*: Lindsay Poirier, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Bradley Fidler, Stevens Institute of Technology Increasingly, oral histories, field notes, and other qualitative materials produced in the humanities are being understood as humanities “data.” Rapid advances in data science are driving much of this change, provoking humanists to think through how to critically and ethically approach data management and to explore experimental possibilities for sharing, mining, and interpreting humanities data. This panel will explore possibilities for initiating new conversations with computer and data scientists regarding opportunities and challenges for producing information infrastructures and digital tools to support humanistic research. This task is not without precedent. On a prosaic level, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) both originated in efforts by computer science to answer questions that long challenged humanistic scholars. On the level of tools, humanists rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), databases, and other information technologies that originated in STEM. However, collaborative efforts between computer scientists and humanists to produce digital infrastructures and tools sensitive to the assumptions and commitments that guide humanistic research have only emerged recently (through domains such as the digital humanities and critical code studies). Having long assessed the epistemic assumptions designed into systems of knowledge production, STS is uniquely well positioned within the humanities to contribute critical insight to such conversations. This panel seeks to bring together transnational STS scholars interested in: - assessing, critiquing, and advancing research infrastructures and digital tools for humanistic data management and analysis and; - identifying and evaluating possibilities for new collaborations between humanists and STEM researchers in this area. Open panel paper submissions should be in the form of abstracts of up to 250 words. They should include the paper’s main arguments, methods, and contributions to STS. When submitting papers to open panels on the abstract submission platform, you will select the Open Panel you are submitting to. Papers submitted to an open session will be reviewed by the open session organizers and will be given first consideration for that session. Papers not included in the session to which they were submitted will be considered for other sessions. Abstracts can be submitted here <https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s18/>. -- Lindsay Poirier PhD Candidate, HASS Fellow Lead Platform Architect, PECE RDA Data Share Fellow Science and Technology Studies | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute poiril@rpi.edu | lindsaypoirier.com