Conclusion: on failing

Anna-Maria Sichani and Michael Donnay

While developing this volume, several major cyberattacks targeted cultural heritage infrastructures, including the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library and Toronto Public Library. These incidents of ‘vanishing culture’ (Messarra et al. 2024) should be seen as stark reminders of the inherent fragility of the digital realm, underscoring that digital scholarship is fraught with unexpected challenges and failures, often beyond the scope of even the most meticulously crafted contingency and risk management plans. Failure, brokenness, loss, struggle are the default, not the exception.

However, those of us working in digital scholarship are accustomed to navigating such moments of crisis and risk. Our work is full of these kinds of operational risk – alongside the conceptual risks we’re accustomed to taking in our research – and so we can offer our failure as a resource to others who may be grappling with these concerns for the first time. We are used to dealing with emerging technologies and the rapidly evolving risks that accompany them, even if they elude our full comprehension. We find ways to deal with complex data and systems, even as we wrestle with obsolete media and fragile infrastructure. We manage complex relationships and navigate broken institutional frameworks. Whether successfully or not, the willingness to tackle these issues head on can be our contribution.

We embarked on this volume with a double hope: to return failure to our critical repertoire and to develop a constructive and compassionate way to speak and think about failure in digital scholarship. While we focused on four broad areas – innovation, technology, collaboration and institutions – we hope the reflections can serve as a scaffold for a rich exploration of failure in other parts of the research ecosystem.

We believe the essence of failure lies outside easy categorisation, in the hard-to-see corners of our everyday. Failure finds its natural place in the cracks between things – between innovation and technological obsolescence, between personal relationships and institutional systems. And it is through these cracks that we glimpse, not necessarily success, but a brave sense of hope for the future.