Part IV INSTITUTIONS

Failure and institutions

Institutional frameworks are failing (us). The pillars of our research and professional culture – from university operational frameworks, evaluative frameworks and peer review, research funding mechanisms, career progression structures, to publishing models and professional associations – are falling apart while they fail to address evolving concerns and needs of a community and a field that are in constant motion. These failures are deeply historical and rooted in, among many other things, the neoliberal marketisation of the public sphere (Slaughter and Rhoades 2000; Fitzpatrick 2019). In this context, failure can be a useful heuristic for identifying the places where things are not working, particularly when we want to examine systems that might otherwise resist analysis, let alone change.

Using failure this way is one of the distinctive contributions of digital humanities – ‘the digital humanities … scandalously reveal the system’s components, while focusing critical attention on the mechanisms needed to maintain them’ (Greenspan 2019). The reflections in this section take up that tradition, examining failures in our institutions and systems – including within digital humanities organisations themselves.

These failures begin early in the career of many practitioners, as postgraduate training programmes fail to adequately support the digital researcher. Jennifer Isasi describes how exploring (the possibility of) failure as a pathway to success was an eye-opening experience for her, beginning in her PhD years. This perspective encouraged her to experiment with an alternative career path that offered the flexibility to pursue her chosen, often risky, scholarly questions. Many students don’t receive that kind of support and, as Britt Amell argues, even traditional narratives of failure can leave specific students without sufficient scaffolding for their experimental or alternative approaches to scholarship. Elena Spadini extends these reflections further along the career pathway, drawing on examples from the critique génétique to remind us that what truly defines a career are the failures and rejections.

A major undercurrent facing digital scholars is that higher education institutions, as well as research funders, fail to truly understand interdisciplinary research. In practice, interdisciplinary research carries significant risk and a higher chance of failure, as Naomi Wells highlights in her reflection. According to Wells, although research funders are starting to address this issue, these efforts remain misaligned with evaluation and assessment mechanisms that still focus primarily on outcome-based metrics.

The dominance of a metrics-based culture has also played a major role in the crisis facing academic publishing. Academic professional culture – as well as formal promotion criteria – has been built on a publishing model that emphasises quantitative proxies for quality such as impact factors and citations metrics (Declaration on Research Assessment 2024). Experimental publishing has been proposed by Janneke Adema as a creative and counterhegemonic response to the systemic failure of the academic publishing system. This commitment to experiment, while holding on to key academic values, is similarly emphasised by Anisa Hawes and Riva Quiroga in their piece on changes to the publishing workflow at the Programming Historian aimed at addressing failures which emerged as the journal expanded.

Digital scholarship organisations are not immune from these systemic failures, as Hawes and Quiroga make clear. One area where the original optimism surrounding digital humanities has fallen far short is the field’s professional organisations. Using conference attendance as a proxy for inclusion in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, the umbrella organisation for national digital humanities associations, Nabeel Siddiqui reminds us of the unfulfilled promise of inclusivity in the field. He uncovers a ‘geographical failure of DH’ that highlights a geography of power that the community has frequently failed to adequately acknowledge.

References

• Declaration on Research Assessment. ‘Guidance on the Responsible Use of Quantitative Indicators in Research Assessment’. DORA. 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.10979643.
• Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.
• Greenspan, Brian. ‘The Scandal of Digital Humanities’. In Debates in Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 92–5. Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452963785.
• Slaughter, Sheila and Gary Rhoades. ‘The Neo-Liberal University’, New Labor Forum 6, (2020): 73–9.