Part II: Technology

Failure and technological obsolescence

Anna-Maria Sichani and Michael Donnay

Digital things constantly break. Our systems crash. An essential piece of software is no longer supported. There is an error message on the landing page of a project’s website. A dataset is in an unreadable format. The computer no longer has a way to read a once-common storage device.

Media and digital technology evolve rapidly and things that were once new and innovative – devices, technical standards, programming languages – are quickly surpassed by newer ones. Technologies that once undergirded whole digital ecosystems are now semi-functional, if they are usable at all (Mladentseva 2022). Researchers working in digital scholarship encounter this challenge in two distinct areas of their work: the digital as an object of study and the digital as a tool for scholarship (Gitelman 2008). In both cases, the fragility of technical systems is keenly felt.

Those who study digital systems or digitally-mediated communities are more aware than most of the constant cycle of obsolescence that seems to define digital technology in particular. This is a relatively new challenge for scholars – as Carolyn Marvin (1988, 2) reminds us, ‘new technologies is a historically relative term’ – and Frances Corry reflects on the difficulties, logistical and otherwise, inherent to studying these things.

Since digital scholarship brings with it this notion of building, alongside an ethos of experimentation, we also have our own long list of technical failures to address (Dombrowski 2014; Star and Ruhleder 1996). Despite concerns dating back to the 1990s, only in the last few years have keywords like ‘sustainability’, ‘maintenance’ and ‘resiliency’ become de rigueur in project plans and funding requirements (Smithies et al 2019; Holmes et al. 2023). Jenny Mitcham’s reflection points to the role that open discussions of failure can play in encouraging these developments, while at the same time reminding us that the fetishisation of ‘best practice’ can sometimes detract from meaningful action.

Despite this recent focus on sustainability, the funding model for research still means that digital outputs often fall into disrepair almost the moment they are finished. Many more fail to be accessible after a few years, let alone for the decades-long timescales expected of scholarly outputs in the humanities. Arianna Ciula addresses some of these challenges in her reflection, drawing on the long history that King’s Digital Lab has in maintaining legacy digital projects. Even when long term solutions do succeed, as they did with TEI-XML, Joris van Zundert argues that we can become victims of our own (apparent) success - locked into the philosophies of these specific technologies in a way that leads to future failure.

Bibliography

Dombrowski, Quinn. ‘“Whatever Happened to Project Bamboo?”’ Literary and Linguistic Computing 29 (3) (2014): 326–39. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu026.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. MIT Press, 2008.

Holmes, Martin, Janelle Jenstad, and Matthew J. Huculak. ‘Introduction to Special Issue: Project Resiliency in the Digital Humanities’. Digital Humanities Quarterly 17 (1) (2023). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/1/000671/000671.html.

Marvin, Carolyn. When old technologies were new. Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth Century. Oxford UP, 1988.

Mladentseva, Anna. ‘Responding to Obsolescence in Flash-Based Net Art: A Case Study on Migrating Sinae Kim’s Genesis’. Journal of the Institute of Conservation 45 (1) (2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2021.2007412.

Smithies, James, Carina Westling, Anna-Maria Sichani, Pam Mellen, and Arianna Ciula. ‘Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab’. Digital Humanities Quarterly 13 (1) (2019). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/1/000411/000411.html#

Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. ‘Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces’. Information Systems Research 7 (1) (2019). https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.7.1.111.