Naomi Wells

The increasing openness towards failure and how we can productively learn from and build on our own experiences of failure is undoubtedly a positive development. Nevertheless, it is vital that alongside individual or project-specific experiences of failure we also account for the wider structures and systems in which such failures take place. We must acknowledge failure does not always fall evenly – and most importantly equitably – on different people, and that repeated experiences of failure can stall or even block individuals from advancing their careers. This chapter seeks to look beyond the individual to highlight some of the wider issues in the research landscape that contribute to failure and to address how those working in the field of digital humanities (DH) might contribute to tackling such challenges. These reflections are predominantly grounded in the UK research landscape with which I am most familiar, but it is hoped that at least some of these experiences might also translate to other contexts.

It is particularly important that we turn our critical attention to the assessment and evaluation systems within which funding grants, publications or job applications fail. Given the inherent interdisciplinarity of DH research and researchers, the widely acknowledged limitations of these systems in fairly assessing inter- or transdisciplinary research and profiles are a particular concern. Those of us working within DH will all have faced experiences of reviewers or interviewers judging our work or profiles according to the conventions of a specific discipline and consequently failing to understand the purpose or significance of our work. For as Klein highlights, interdisciplinarity and DH often ‘fall outside conventional criteria of evaluation’, with evaluators struggling to understand ‘what counts as an acceptable form of knowledge production in the field’ (Klein 2015).

In the UK context, the British Academy’s 2016 report on interdisciplinarity highlighted that due to such obstacles many academics would advise an early career researcher against undertaking interdisciplinary research (British Academy 2016). There has nevertheless been some progress in recent years towards better recognising and valuing interdisciplinary research. The increasing focus on challenge-led research by major research funders has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches for tackling such challenges. The UK’s research assessment exercise (REF) in 2021 also introduced an Interdisciplinary Research Advisory Panel to better support effective recognition for interdisciplinary research. As part of this new approach institutions were asked to flag interdisciplinary research in their submissions, although interestingly the panel reported significant failings with this system with institutions either using flags inappropriately or failing to flag any interdisciplinary submissions at all (REF2021 2022).

These issues point to institutions apparently both failing to understand interdisciplinarity and, particularly in the cases of institutions who flagged no interdisciplinary submissions, continuing a risk-averse approach to submitting interdisciplinary research for assessment. Similar conservatism has also been highlighted by the Hidden REF initiative – highlighting the ongoing institutional failure to submit less conventional forms of research output, which are often associated with interdisciplinary digital research (Hidden REF n.d.). These examples highlight the key challenge that while we have seen more positive discourses from funders and national bodies around interdisciplinarity in recent years, conservatism within the assessment system remains.

As Edmond has written, DH has ‘found itself at the heart of a conflict between shifting practices and static structures’ (Edmond 2019). The consolidation of DH departments and centres in the UK has undoubtedly helped to create a more welcoming ‘home’ for the kind of interdisciplinary digital research practices that the British Academy’s report identified as often lacking for interdisciplinary researchers. However, DH still suffers from a level of invisibility in the UK’s research assessment and funding structures, not having for example its own REF subpanel or being listed as a discipline classification on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s funding system. This invisibility increases the risks of DH research being sent to reviewers or assessors with a limited understanding of the specific types of research conducted in the field.

While there have been efforts to involve scholars from different disciplines in the assessment of interdisciplinary digital research, the Modern Language Association’s Guidelines for Assessing Digital Scholarship (2024) highlight the risks of an ‘epistemic mismatch’, particularly if reviewers are not familiar with the intellectual traditions of the humanities. As a result it is vital that we continue to advocate for greater visibility for DH within the UK’s assessment and evaluation systems, and follow the example of many US subject associations by being more proactive in developing our own evaluation guidelines and criteria for digital scholarship. This work is particularly crucial for those doing DH research outside of DH departments and centres who face even greater challenges in ensuring that departmental reward structures recognise the different nature and outputs of their research.

When considering failings in our assessment and evaluation systems, we must also recognise that failures at more advanced career stages do not necessarily have the same effects on careers as those that occur much earlier in the process, such as the failure to secure PhD funding or that crucial first academic post or fellowship. While those from more financially secure backgrounds might be able to make repeated attempts until successful, for those without such a safety net it will more quickly become necessary to stop trying and turn to other career paths. Acknowledging such inequities should not be confused with reinforcing traditional academic discourses that have suggested that the choice to move outside of academia is itself a failure. Rather, we should acknowledge the differing circumstances in which such choices are made.

Equally, feelings of ‘failure’ associated with such moves may be connected to the more limited number of viable research-led careers that exist for humanities researchers outside of academia. A 2022 report on doctoral graduate employment, for example, found that those with an arts and humanities PhD were less likely than those in other fields to report that they used their doctoral skills or that their job fitted their career plan (Vitae 2022). While many may go on to have fulfilling careers in other sectors, these findings point to potential feelings of frustration, disappointment or even failure in not being able to apply their research skills.

The picture appears more positive for DH, with the range of knowledge and skills gained through a DH PhD appearing to be more appealing and applicable to a diverse range of research-related roles (Cannelli et al. 2021). Within DH there is also greater openness to the experiences and approaches that researchers with different professional backgrounds and profiles bring to the field. This greater openness may provide a space for those who have faced structural barriers to undertaking the conventional academic career path and help to overcome the sense of ‘make or break’ that operates within traditional research careers in the humanities. In this respect, DH has a valuable role to play in sharing approaches to and experiences of cross-sector mobility with the wider humanities community and particularly doctoral students who may understandably fear the seeming cliff edge that faces them at the end of their studies. DH must also continue its work to challenge and transform the reward structures in academia to better recognise different roles and how they contribute in different but crucial ways to the success of research.

Nevertheless, despite some areas of optimism for DH, we must also acknowledge the prejudices and implicit biases in our systems and, as researchers such as Risam (2015) have highlighted, the field of DH is not exempt from these issues. A notable acknowledgement of such biases in the wider research funding landscape is the recent experiment by the British Academy to introduce partial randomisation in the selection process for their small grants scheme. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this approach has led to a more ethnically and institutionally diverse field of applicants succeeding in the scheme (British Academy 2023).

While it is promising to see funders seek to address this issue, this example highlights the significant work still needed to address the biases operating across our assessment and evaluation systems. Here, as well as working to recognise and combat our own biases, DH researchers might reflect on how the field can contribute to better understanding how these biases operate across our research systems. The Creative Informatics project has, for example, illustrated how data-driven research methods in DH can be applied to better understand the effectiveness of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives in the creative industries (Black 2023). Siddiqui in this volume also uses DH methods to highlight the geographic inequalities in Digital Humanities conferences that can hinder the career advancement of scholars, particularly in the Global South. Such examples illustrate the value of turning DH methods inwards to analyse our own institutional, national and international research structures to better understand how and why failure falls inequitably on specific individuals and groups.

In sum, while not ignoring how failure can be an individual learning experience, we must acknowledge that some of the determining factors that contribute to failure operate outside of circumstances that are within an individual’s control or capabilities to overcome. This is not to promote a fatalistic approach to failure but rather to highlight that only by understanding and acknowledging these failings in our systems can the DH community identify and advocate for the changes that are needed. While failure will inevitably remain a feature of all research careers, we must ask ourselves how we can work together to tackle the wider systemic issues that make it much harder for some forms of research and some researchers to succeed than others.