# The Field Mouse and the Pelican > [!tip] Referenz > Contribution in [EASST Review 44-2](https://easst.net/easst-review/44-2/the-field-mouse-and-the-pelican/) from March 2026. ## The Field: A Humanities Research Centre This contribution is about an _infrable_, which is a fable about infrastructure. I wrote this piece of fiction to deliver insights from my research and to intervene in the infrastructure the story is about. The infrastructure in question is (broadly speaking) the sociotechnical apparatus of research data management in the humanities. I am in contact with this infrastructure through my ethnographic site, a [Collaborative Research Centre](https://www.dfg.de/en/research-funding/funding-opportunities/programmes/coordinated-programmes/collaborative-research-centres) at a German university. This research centre brings together around 60 researchers from the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences across 15 subprojects under a shared programme. Many of the projects are interested in pre-digital or post-digital (Stalder, 2018) technologies, while digital methods are relatively rare. Data is a recurring topic; the handling of one’s own research materials as data, less so. That does not mean there is no care. Most of the researchers maintain collections of materials and ideas, which they handle and process through data practices. However, the ways in which this happens are highly particular and rarely discussed. ![[nfdi-2025.jpg]] ## The Cloud: Research Data Management Not unlike the academic landscape as a whole, researchers in my field find themselves in an environment increasingly populated by guidelines, services, policies and tools regulating how research data management is supposed to be done. In less than four years since the research centre opened, a preliminary _Working Group Research Data_ has grown into _Research Data Services_ at the centre’s university. Similarly, _NFDI4Culture_, one of the humanities sections of the _National Research Data Infrastructure_ (NFDI), founded in 2020, entered its second phase just in 2025. The NFDI4Culture Community Plenary that year, which I attended for the first time as an ambassador and a spy, exuded a cheerful and familiar atmosphere. The consortium’s speaker welcomed presenters with the greeting ‘Dear culture people’, and I wasn’t quite sure if I was included. An introductory presentation celebrated the extension of the project. The speaker thanked meritorious members, handed out gifts, and listed the services that had been successfully set up over the first five years of the project. However, they also identified future challenges raised by reviewers, primarily the need for more integrated cooperation throughout the network. At this conference, I presented the following infrable, printed on a poster and in a zine. ## The Infrable: The Field Mouse and the Pelican A field mouse and a pelican had become friends. The field mouse lived in a colourful garden by a lake. Every year, the pelican landed on the lake to visit the mouse. Throughout the year, the field mouse collected seeds, sorting them by colour and pattern before tying them into necklaces that hung from the cave’s ceiling. When the pelican came to visit, they would sit together in the cave beneath the many necklaces. ‘High up in the clouds,’ said the pelican, ‘there is a heavenly mill. It produces the finest, whitest flour, and everyone loves it. Give me some of your seeds, and I’ll take them there, so the badgers in the north can make salty pretzels and the toads in the south can make sweet cakes.’ ‘My friend,’ said the field mouse, ‘the flour from the clouds is delicious and fine, but what about all the colours and patterns of my precious seeds? There are so many possible necklaces, and I haven’t made them all yet.’ _This infrable can be told in situations where research data is handled and valued in different ways. It considers multiple modes of caring for research data. Its motto is: Fine fields, careful clouds._ ## The Method: How InfrablesAre Made and Why They Matter You’ve probably heard a fable before. They are short stories in which animals and other beings take on human characteristics. The sentences are short, and the scenery is described quickly and to the point. Fables usually have a moral, which is often explicitly stated at the end of the text. Taking up this form, the beings populating infrables take on features of infrastructures. It is precisely the strict form that opens up space for even more speculative beings and relationships. Infrables were originally developed by _The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest_ (TiTiPi, 2022) as a political, collective and solidarity-based practice to be done in small groups to ‘identify oppressive infrastructures or tools, but […] also make space for other technological attitudes’. I wrote the infrable above myself, drawing on my ethnographic research. Whereas TiTiPi’s stories take a clear political stance, I opted for a more ambivalent but nonetheless interventionist approach. Presented at the _NFDI4Culture_ conference, the story was intended to make concepts from my research available for discussion, especially for participants in the field. While I must refrain from discussing the infrable’s possible interpretations in detail, I would like to point out that the story concerns the varying significance of seemingly identical data in different situations. While the goals of accessibility and collaboration pursued by larger research data infrastructures are laudable, the value of local data practices can get lost in the process. Data are not better or worse depending solely on whether they reside in the field or in the cloud. Therefore, the story is intended to illustrate how specific and personal data collections can be, while also demonstrating their potential once they leave their local context. Humanities research data practices are a relevant topic that might benefit from more STS-informed attention. Many researchers from my field don’t identify as digital humanists but draw from a rich tradition of interpretive procedures that mobilise small collections of carefully selected materials. Their everyday research includes all kinds of digital and non-digital data practices, like taking notes, managing literature, or sorting images and scans. At the same time, data is treated with caution, as potentially positivistic or just less relevant than other uses of material. STS approaches seem well-suited to documenting these research data practices and clarifying their significance for the humanities research process. Furthermore, it can advocate for these practices in the face of a research data management culture that does not always support them. Infrables, in turn, are useful components of this attentiveness because, together with ethnographic research, they are a way of presenting research data interpretively and speculatively. The use of storytelling in research draws on a rich tradition. For a long time, ethnography has involved processes akin to writing stories (Geertz, 1988), and myths have been used to deploy or irritate theoretical concepts. For instance, Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ reinterpret _Odyssey_ to articulate their key ideas, while the works of Michel Serres are permeated by retold myths and fables. In Serres’s book _The Parasite_ (1982), Aesop’s fable _The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse_ plays an introductory role in unfolding the multiple layers of the book’s eponymous concept. Annemarie Mol (2021) further develops Serres’s approach as part of an ‘empirical philosophy’. The objective is to regard stories as exemplary situations that connect abstract reasoning with empirical practice, encourage reinterpretation, and have the capacity to create new virtual situations to challenge rigid models. As Haraway (2016) asserts, stories are endowed with great generative power, working as interrelated modes of creating worlds through thought and action (‘worlding’). Thus, I propose infrables as a method of doing _virtual research_—a way to connect speculative inquiry and empirical practice. ## Reference List Geertz, C. (1988). _Works and lives: The anthropologist as author_. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Haraway, D.J. (2016). _Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the_ _Chthulucene_. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (2002). _Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments_. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Mol, A. (2021). _Eating in theory, Experimental futures_. Durham: Duke University Press. Serres, M, (2007). _The parasite_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stalder, F. (2018). _The digital condition_. Cambridge, Medford: Polity Press. _The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI)_(2022). Infrables. Available at: [https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Infrables](https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Infrables)