Of domains, their knowledge, and their infrastructure

In my recent writings I have focused on the actors’ category ‘domain’, often used in computational circles (eg, data science, AI, etc.), as with ‘domain expert’,‘domain scientist’or ‘domain knowledge’. While domain is a term used casually–or vernacularly–I have argued that it is a keyword for computational fields: that it names a long-standing object of inquiry and of intervention, used today in a wide variety of interlocking fields such as librarianship, data management, knowledge management, and cyberinfrastructure, but that its genealogy can be, in part, traced back to early artificial intelligence. The use of domain, far from innocent, activates a particular view of the role of computation and its relationship with ‘the domains’(ie, everything else), and also plays that role in infrastructure circles (ie, infrastructure for this domain, that domain, or all domains).