Processes of evaluating the societal impact of research infrastructures (RIs) often reproduce what Amartya Sen (Equality of What?, 1980) identified as a “category error”: mistaking the means of for its ends. In the Digital Humanities, this manifests in an emphasis on quantifiable metrics – data volume, code repositories, user statistics – as if access to digital resources automatically translated into capability, understanding, or empowerment. Yet access without usable meaning does not constitute impact. To move beyond this resource-centric view, we must conceptualise infrastructures not only as technical assemblages but as enablers of human agency.

This paper develops such a conceptual shift by adopting Ingrid Robeyns’ Modular View of the Capability Approach (Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017) as a framework for analysing research infrastructures. Robeyns articulates a clear distinction between resources and functionings – that is, between what individuals have access to and what they can actually do or be as a result. Between these poles lie conversion factors: personal, social, and environmental conditions that determine whether resources yield valued outcomes. Within the Digital Humanities, infrastructures can be understood as precisely such conversion factors. Their role is not limited to storing or processing data but extends to creating the epistemic and institutional conditions that allow diverse users to transform data into knowledge.

This reconceptualisation helps address a central challenge identified by Edmond and Lehmann (“Digital humanities, knowledge complexity, and the five ‘aporias’ of digital research”, 2021): the “aporia” between processability (the machine’s need for standardised, decontextualised inputs) and context (the humanist’s commitment to interpretive depth and situated meaning). Digital infrastructures are often caught between these two imperatives, flattening complexity in the name of interoperability while aspiring to support nuanced cultural analysis. When approached through Robeyns’ lens, an infrastructure’s value no longer depends on technical efficiency alone but on its capacity to mediate this aporia – to convert raw, processable data into conditions for “participatory sense-making” (Edmond, Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research, 2020).

Treating infrastructures as conversion factors shifts evaluative focus from quantities to capabilities. What matters is not merely how much data are opened or processed, but whether infrastructures expand the ability of communities – scholars, heritage professionals, and citizens – to engage critically with cultural materials and co-construct interpretations of the past. Such a perspective reframes impact as a function of epistemic inclusion: infrastructures succeed when they bridge between technical processability and social intelligibility, between data availability and interpretive agency.

By integrating Robeyns’ modular framework with Digital Humanities debates on infrastructural power and epistemic mediation, this paper offers DARIAH a theoretical vocabulary for rethinking impact. It positions infrastructure-as-conversion-factor as a conceptual tool for evaluating not only what infrastructures make possible technically, but what they make achievable socially. Doing so redefines the societal value of research infrastructures as the extent to which they transform access into capability, and data into collective understanding.