Introduction: reframing failure

Anna-Maria Sichani and Michael Donnay

Failure is ordinary. Paraphrasing Raymond Williams’s famous quote on culture (McGuigan 2014), this book talks about failure as an everyday, common thing both in life and in digital scholarship. The truth is that no one gets through life without failing – in both minor and often significant ways. When we fail, it may feel as if we are alone in this. However, there is nothing more human than to fail: a relationship crisis, a failed exam, a career reversal, a book proposal rejection or a bungled project. To err is human – to fail is too.

Yet, for something so central to our experience, failure often sits at the periphery of our writing, training and professional discourse. This inability to see failure as an essential part of our work does not just have the potential to leave us feeling isolated. It also leaves a sizeable hole in how we understand the process of doing digital scholarship. Its absence can lead to an incomplete understanding of our own research, teaching and collaborations. This book encourages us to recentre failure as a core part of our scholarship.

This book aims to do two related and interlocking things. The first is to develop a vocabulary for failure that is critical, constructive and compassionate. Much of the language associated with failure draws on negative emotions or implies a personal, moral deficiency on the part of the individual who has failed. This negative discourse discourages a critical engagement with failure, while the focus on the individual can ignore the systemic issues at play. We aim to replace that language with a vocabulary that fosters critical and constructive engagement, while at the same time speaking with an appropriate compassion for those involved.

The second is to bring a renewed critical focus to failure as an object of inquiry and contribute to the growing and increasingly diverse body of ‘critical digital humanities’. In many ways, failure has been a defining element of digital scholarship in the arts and humanities over the last several decades. These failures have sparked excellent reflections from practitioners like Shawn Graham and Quinn Dombrowski, who have called for the field to explore failure more critically and seriously (Graham 2019; Dombrowski 2014). Yet despite these writings and continued technical, social and institutional failures in the field, a sustained engagement with failure has not materialised.

As other fields in the humanities begin to reassess their relationship with failure and digital scholarship begins a renewed engagement with questions of technical and environmental sustainability – or lack thereof – now seems like a particularly generative moment to return to this conversation (Coleman 2023). This collection offers an updated and richly interdisciplinary set of perspectives, drawing on recent experience and developments, while remaining rooted in the critical and reflective tradition of earlier writing in the field (Greenspan 2019).

In bringing together the reflective, personal approach with a critical perspective, we want to move away from the approach that self-improvement and motivational literature takes to failure (for example, see Lachkovic 2024). We are not offering a guide on learning to fail forward or succeed at failure. We are not going to glorify the technocratic call to ‘move fast and break things’. And we aren’t going to offer any secret advice about how to avoid failure.

Instead, this book offers examples of real-world failures for evaluation, discussion and critical reflection. We want to showcase the various types of failure in digital scholarship. We want to normalise a discourse of open conversation (and practice) around failure in academic and professional life. And we want to remind one another that we are not alone in making mistakes, not alone in failing.

Failure in digital scholarship

The book is structured around four major conversations within digital scholarship: innovation, technology, collaboration and institutions. These groupings represent our best (and perhaps failed) editorial effort to provide structure to the collection, but there are certainly overlaps and discussions that reach across sections. Each chapter is made up of short reflections offering the author’s distinct perspective on failure relating to that issue. Every reflection stands on its own – and can be read as such – but is also in conversation with the other pieces alongside it. They are written in a variety of styles, reflecting both the practice in each author’s home discipline and their personal approach to the topic.

Contributors come from a deliberately wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and work in different institutional and national contexts across the globe. Their perspectives are informed by and connected to their research, but they are also deeply grounded in their individual positionality. The reflective mode allows for a more candid approach than traditional academic writing and hopefully captures some of the generous spirit of dialogue we have found with our contributors.

While many of our contributors identify as digital humanists, not all do, and so we have chosen the more expansive term ‘digital scholarship’ to describe the areas of research with which this collection is concerned. Digital scholarship refers broadly to the use of digital methods and technologies, without setting a boundary around the specific disciplines they are applied to (Digital Scholarship @ Oxford n.d.). We have tried to be similarly expansive when setting the focus for this book and you will see both terms used throughout. We hope this will allow those working within digital scholarship, as well as those in other (even non-digital) communities of practice, to draw on these reflections.

When taken as a whole, the book offers a polyvocal snapshot of the ‘state of failure’ in digital scholarship and serves as an invitation to pull failure back from the periphery of our understanding of the field – and ourselves.

Failure and innovation

Lisa Spiro’s 2012 observation – that the ‘digital humanities community recognizes the value of failure in the pursuit of innovation’ – also serves as a provocation for the community to examine its relationship to innovation (Spiro 2012). In many ways, the ethos of digital scholarship resembles that of the technology sector, characterised by a bias towards ‘newness’ (Sichani 2022). Indeed, digital humanities practitioners have often built a professional identity that celebrates risky playfulness (Nowviskie 2016) and ‘screwing around’ (Ramsay 2014). But when our methodological orientation leans too far in that direction, we are at risk of adopting the same techno-optimist frameworks that prioritise novelty and (disruptive) innovation which several of the reflections in this chapter critique.

Despite the crucial role failure plays in innovation, there remains a strong taboo against publicly acknowledging that side of the coin. For example, the affordances of contemporary software development – such as version control and trackable revision histories – could allow for an open-ended, extensible and constantly updated research output. While these tools offer the potential to embrace a ‘culture of the perpetual prototype’ (Flanders 2015) or ‘perpetual beta’ (Nowviskie 2012), institutional pressure from funding bodies and universities to demonstrate concrete deliverables means there is little room for the failure inherent in prototyping to be manifested as such. Some of the reflections in this section address this challenge and consider how failure might point us in the direction of a more sustainable approach to innovation and the work required to move us there.

Failure and technological obsolescence

Technical obsolescence is quickly becoming one of the main focuses for digital researchers. The field has long been aware of the challenges involved in maintaining digital projects and data, but the topic has taken on an increased urgency in recent years as major changes to foundational technologies, like the sunsetting of Adobe Flash in late 2020, and the increase in cyberattacks on cultural heritage institutions and infrastructures (Warren 2024; Keating 2024), have made the maintenance challenges even more stark. In response, there has been a growing and vivid discussion around technical sustainability and maintenance (Holmes et al. 2023).

However, these technical conversations are only just beginning to connect to the theoretical, social and institutional contexts where failure also plays a major (unacknowledged) role (Holmes et al. 2023). Specific solutions, like static websites, still tend to put the focus on technological solutions rather than addressing the people and skills required to maintain digital objects (Dombrowski 2022). Ironically, even when systemic solutions to technical obsolescence are proposed, they rarely come with the necessary funding. So even though the funding bodies in the United Kingdom now require a data management plan, they rarely if ever allow grant funding to be used to cover project maintenance beyond the end date of the project (UKRI 2018).

The reflections in this section draw on diverse experiences of technological obsolescence to consider how we can better manage the inevitable failure of our digital objects and how we might study those objects when they have failed. They pay particular attention to the role our human infrastructure plays in sustaining tools and technical systems.

Failure and collaboration

Digital research is almost always a collaborative endeavour, and so enabling and managing collaborations is a core concern for digital scholars and practitioners. Unlike many other humanities disciplines, digital projects regularly require large teams that bring together a wide range of skills, professional expertise and communities of practice. These teams often include people working in software development, cultural heritage institutions and universities – all of whom can bring different assumptions and professional languages to a project (Neubert 2020). The discipline has long been aware of the challenges in working this way, with some of the most insightful writing on the topic coming from collaborators normally relegated to the periphery of the academy (Bell and Kennan 2021).

However, for a field that prides itself on interdisciplinarity, we still spend little time discussing how to do it well (Ahnert et al. 2023). This is, in part, because humanities scholars rarely have a professional venue to discuss their research process as opposed to outputs. It’s also because we are less willing to acknowledge when these collaborations go wrong (as they often can). This can often be out of an understandable desire to protect relationships. Yet this unwillingness to discuss when and how collaborations go wrong can leave future projects ill-prepared to address similar challenges. Moreover, the informal way these challenges are discussed privileges those who have access to those professional networks and excludes those who do not. Each reflection in this section takes those ‘coffee break’ conversations and brings a critical and constructive lens to them.

Failure and institutions

Although not unique to digital scholarship, systemic challenges within institutions are perhaps more keenly felt because of the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the field (Greenspan 2019). These challenges cut across the three other areas of the book, with many of the failures of innovation, technical infrastructure and collaboration directly tied to wider systemic issues. In many ways, the failure of institutional frameworks, from funding systems to postgraduate training, circumscribe all the work we do – a theme taken up by several reflections in this section.

As a field we continue to fall short of our aspirations for better utilising digital technology to create a more equitable research culture, despite any number of guidelines about citing digital outputs, assessing digital scholarship and acknowledging contributors’ roles in research outputs (Editorial Process n.d.; Modern Language Association 2012; Allen et al. 2019). Reflections in this chapter take up some of these challenges and propose alternatives that leverage the affordances of digital publishing in particular to shift institutional cultures.

This section also acknowledges that failure brings different risks for different people. The privilege to fail publicly is still more likely to be afforded to white, male and permanently employed academics (Gupta in Graham 2019), while those with more precarious positions face additional barriers to publicly discussing their failures. These practitioners are also the ones most likely to be failed by existing institutional structures, compounding the issue. A number of contributors address these challenges explicitly and it’s a thread we hope is evident throughout the book.

Reframing failure

In bringing together this community of authors, our hope is to make clear the important place of failure in scholarly life. We want to reflect on failure in the round, bringing critical attention to the (often unacknowledged) role it plays in shaping our response to some of the core questions in the field.

By proposing failure as a commonplace of our theoretical, critical and technological endeavours, this book aims to offer an unusual – hopefully not too failed – account of our everyday professional practice. By naturalising and normalising failure in its various iterations, we seek to promote a mode of digital scholarship that accepts, celebrates and cares for human creativity beyond success and innovation.

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Part I: Innovation

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