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Making sense of earthquakes: public information infrastructures and post-disaster event epistemologies -- The production and circulation of earthquake knowledge in 1868 California -- Accounting for people after the 1906 earthquake -- The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake: public information for alternative earthquake publics -- Today: planned disaster response meets new media platforms -- Comparing information orders: continuity and change

The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire broke physical information and communication technologies at the very moment that people wanted to connect with loved ones using the telegraph – the quickest way to send messages. Sending telegrams was one means by which people connected with each other, but the telegraphic infrastructure, like much of the physical infrastructure, was badly damaged. Telegraph operators labored long hours to repair the telecommunications infrastructures or to enact workarounds. The telegraph companies credited employees with taking great personal risk to ensure that the world knew about the disaster -- these operators and engineers were called "heroes." However, even as these employees worked in exceptional circumstances and were celebrated for their heroic actions, they were reproducing the "normal" ordering of information infrastructures. Telegraph companies were taking money from people to ostensibly deliver telegrams via speedy but broken telegraphic infrastructure when in reality often sending the telegrams through the mail. These heroic telegraphers went on strike less than a year after the earthquake and fire when Western Union refused their requests for temporary raises to accommodate the cost-of-living increases in the damaged San Francisco area. While the capitalists running the telegraphic infrastructure publicly celebrated the improvisational work of their employees as heroic, the telegraph did not do what its clients paid for and swindled them. After 89 days the strikers went back to work with no gain. It was a moment of extraordinary upheaval and creative repair which nevertheless seemed to reinforce ordinary political economic ordering.

This dissertation analyzes Californians' information infrastructure after three Bay Area earthquakes: 1868 Hayward Fault Earthquake, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, and 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. I use qualitative and historical research approaches, focusing on documents produced by state and local governments, newspapers and letters by Californians. In my analysis, I employ the construct of "information infrastructure" from the field of Science and Technology Studies to describe the complex constellation of practices, technology and institutions that underpins the public sphere. Four themes help develop the idea of public information infrastructure: continuity, reach, informational authority and multiple infrastructures. First, major disruptions such as earthquakes challenge the continuity of public information infrastructure while making infrastructure visible. For example, after the 1906 earthquake and fire, refugees had to reassemble their social geography. Friends, loved ones, employers and employees all wanted to locate each other and notify others of their well-being. While the physical information infrastructure was destroyed, the ways that people worked and organized was not. Thus, with some work-arounds, information infrastructure within San Francisco was reassembled to working order. Second, I look at one of the qualities of information infrastructure that is considered fundamental - that of the reach of infrastructure across space. In 1868, the circulation of documents to far away audiences shaped the earthquake narrative locally. Third, I examine claims to informational authority. My dissertation begins in 1868, at a time when there were not shared scientific earthquake descriptors such as magnitude, when it took weeks for a newspaper to travel from San Francisco to New York, and when there was no professionalized class of "responders" or specialized government response. The Chamber of Commerce claimed the authority to explain the earthquake. The bureaucratization of disaster response and the rise of scientific explanations for earthquakes shaped infrastructure and information practices, such that by the 1989 earthquake government officials claimed the authority to explain what had happened. The intertwining of science, the state, and infrastructure helped constitute and legitimize a new set of informational authorities, and provide a lens with which to design post-disaster information systems and policy today. Last, I argue that there is not just one information infrastructure, but multiple infrastructures supporting multiple publics. Alternate infrastructures supported Chinese people in 1906 and Spanish-speakers in 1989 when attempting to get aid or find loved ones. My research ties together how technology, media organizations, government institutions, and scientific explanations of earthquakes contribute to a sensemaking epistemology for Californians.

Anticipatory infrastructures assemble sensors that are ready to detect, networks primed to share data, scientists prepared to confirm events, and news organizations poised to tell stories. This article explains how public time is articulated through sensor-mediated communications by examining two anticipatory infrastructures. Each infrastructure uses similar earthquake data to detect, report on, and convene material publics around earthquakes in Southern California. They are integral to structuring rhythms, coordinating syncronizations, setting deadlines, and making events timely, meaningful, and actionable, yet their governance lives in no one place. Instead, they emerge from an assemblage of sensors, networks, devices, algorithms, people, data, organizations, professional practices, and normative theories of the public. By comparing two different anticipatory infrastructures, we show how imagined publics, forms of journalistic storytelling, representations of earthquake events, and system maintenance can convene different public temporalities. We identify four dynamics involved in making these variable temporalities in material publics: how human-machine relations organize time, how professional norms of timeliness collide, how publics are anticipated by infrastructures, and how sensor infrastructures are maintained or decay over time.

To understand news rhythms, scholars have primarily studied how the rituals and routines of news organizations align with the practices and expectations of audiences. The rhythms of today's networked press, though, are set not only by journalists and consumers but also by largely invisible digital infrastructures: software, data, and technologies from outside newsrooms that are increasingly intertwined with journalistic work. Here, we argue that the rhythms of the contemporary, networked press live in the materials, practices, and values of hybrid, time-setting sociotechnical systems, a new concept we call anticipatory news infrastructure. We explicate this concept through a typology of sociotechnical dynamics, showing how the networked press is poised to sense events, structure journalistic work, predict and commodify traffic, architect audience relations, and categorize content. We argue that these infrastructures anticipate possible public life, thus creating anticipation publics through their largely invisible power to shape expectations of journalists and audiences alike.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) began in 1981 as a group of computer scientists concerned about nuclear destruction. Early CPSR members analysed military planning documents and levelled technical critiques at how computers were to be used in battle, highlighting the limits of computing technologies. Although early CPSR arguments were primarily technical, as responsible professionals their practices were based on a collective morality and a willingness to question their profession's economic self-interest. As the Cold War thawed in 1989, CPSR met a series of challenges, including financial issues, leadership turnover, and a changing and expanding role for information technology. CPSR emerged from this crisis with a renewed focus on "civil liberties" that was largely underwritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Although CPSR's civil liberties advocacy sometimes retained its early arguments and practices by addressing the limitations of information technologies, they also adopted the emerging views of Silicon Valley's "digital utopianism," advocating for the growth of information technology. We describe this seemingly contradictory shift in responsibility along three axes: the use of standpoint epistemology for responsible computing, a transition from professional choice to lobbying, and a transition from substantivism to instrumentalism. In this paper, we characterize an important instance of collective responsibility for computing by tracing the evolution of CPSR's first decade of practices, techniques, and arguments with an eye towards the challenges of responsible computing today.

In the last few years, a powerful consensus has emerged among scholars of digitally enabled peer production. In this view, digital technologies and social production processes are driving a dramatic democratization of culture and society. Moreover, leading scholars now suggest that these new, hyper-mediated modes of living and working are specifically challenging the hierarchical structures and concentrated power of bureaucracies. This paper first maps the assumptions underlying the new consensus on peer production so as to reveal the sources of its coherence. It then revisits Max Weber's account of bureaucracy. With Weber in mind, the paper aims to expose analytical weaknesses in the consensus view and offer a new perspective from which to study contemporary digital media.

During COVID-19, countless dashboards served as the central media for people to learn critical information about the pandemic. Varied actors, including news organizations, government agencies, universities, and nongovernmental organizations, created and maintained these dashboards, through the onerous labor of collecting, categorizing, and circulating COVID data. This study uncovers different forms of labor and data practices—the work of "COVID data builders"—behind the construction of these dashboards based on in-depth interviews with volunteers and practitioners across the United States and India who participated in COVID dashboard projects. Specifically, we examine projects focused on marginalized and missing COVID data that aimed to show the pandemic's disproportionate and unjust impact. Through an investigation of data builders' encounters and experiences with missing COVID data in mediating the pandemic, we ask: What data problems did COVID data builders encounter? How did they produce missing COVID data while questioning its representational capacity? And lastly, what "alternative epistemologies of data" beyond representation do their data practices suggest? Through our analysis, we surfaced three types of epistemological ambiguities COVID data builders encountered within their datasets: disappearing and ephemeral data, obscuring data, and disregarded data. By highlighting these different epistemological dimensions of missing data, we conclude that focusing on the performative and infrastructural aspects of what makes datasets "work" builds a new vocabulary for addressing missing data beyond representation. We argue that the politics of counting COVID cases is grounded in the material and affective labor of confronting, navigating, and negotiating with data's epistemological ambiguities.