The Mechanism

The Mechanism (TM) is a research cluster built from found infrastructure: an existing desktop and a disused Raspberry Pi cluster, with a few pieces added where those ran out. It began as an exercise in critical technical practice. The aim was to learn about the affordances and constraints of AI for humanities and social science research by engaging in system design and maintenance myself, not paying for online services where I would be one of many paying customers, or renting cloud infrastructure.

TM is a bespoke system, designed and configured around my own technical and scholarly practices. Its design principles and architecture may be useful more widely, to people designing AI-enabled research platforms, but my focus has been on building a tool for my own research. This site documents the system at a technical level: what it is, how it works, what it costs, and what building it has taught me.

I am only keeping TM in service because it has proven to be surprisingly useful for my research. It has exceeded my expectations, despite being closer to a Heath Robinson machine than a refined computing system. I use TM on a daily basis, as the primary research tool for my next monograph, Infrastructural Inflections: Critical Technical Practice and the Architecture of Knowledge.

---

James Smithies, Australian National University. TM is funded by the ANU Futures Scheme (2024–2026), awarded when I joined the ANU.