Chapter 18. Experimental publishing: Acknowledging, addressing, and embracing failure

Acknowledging Failure

Yet it is important to see these failures in the context of what we want to achieve with these publishing experiments. Often what are perceived as ‘failures’ (for example, lack of uptake, engagement, or further implementation) have to do with the lack of familiarity of authors and publishers with new publishing workflows, software, processes, and roles. At the same time incentives to experiment are further hindered by funder, institutional, publisher, infrastructural, and economic requirements that tend to prioritise certain legacy types of publication and that valorise individual success (Feldman and Sandoval 2018).

Experimenting takes time (and can be costly), yet failure should be perceived as an intrinsic part of experimental publishing projects, part of an iterative process of reflection, review, and – where needed and appropriate – further development. Reflecting on failure also makes the processes of knowledge production and the labour involved in its various stages more visible while highlighting the difficulty scholars and publishers are facing to facilitate engagement around research (integrally connected to the current crises in academia and reflected in ever increasing workloads and precarious labour). This unfamiliarity also extends to the relationalities of publishing, where the roles, functions, and agencies involved in more traditional print-based publishing workflows will need to be reconfigured in more digital and experimental publishing workflows. This might involve incorporating and acknowledging different roles (for example, software developers and designers, the crucial role played by digital technology) or bringing in existing roles and functions at different stages in the research and publishing process. Here publishing becomes less of an afterthought at the end of a research project, and more something that becomes crucial to research design.

To conduct and support experimental (book) publishing projects, my colleagues and I have worked on creating extensive documentation to accompany a selection of pilot projects.1 This documentation serves to demystify some of the processes involved in experimental forms of publishing, to familiarise scholars and publishers with software and tools, workflows, and roles, and to be transparent about where things (can) go wrong, where barriers and inhibitions continue to exist, and where improvements are still needed (Adema and Kiesewetter 2022a). The focus of this documentation is therefore less on showcasing failure as a misstep and more on seeing it as an opening to improving publishing workflows going forward, to accommodate more diverse forms of research, and to entice authors and publishers to try out experimental forms of publishing for themselves.

Addressing Systemic Failure

Over the last few decades, the kind of research that has been conducted within the data-driven humanities, the digital humanities, and the digital posthumanities (Hall 2016) in particular, has triggered a rethink of the way that humanities research has traditionally been and continues to be published (still predominantly following a humanist, print and output-based system and original proprietary authorship models (Adema 2021)). Yet experiments with new forms of publishing continue to come up against how engrained this existing publishing system remains, sustained by various vested and commercial interests, making it a fundamentally conservative system.

In addition to being more open towards failure in experimental publishing (and publishing in general) as an inherent part of its speculative and interventionist appeal, it is important to highlight that experimental publishing is in essence a response against a failing legacy system, one that has been developed based on a print hegemony which is no longer functional in an increasingly (post-)digital context where there is a clear need to share research in different ways and to explore how the digital medium can assist academics and publishers in doing so. This legacy system has a hard time accommodating different forms of distributed authorship or multimodal, processual, and interactive publications, as its profit and reputation-driven economy has been built upon a commodity and object-based publishing model, based on the extraction and exploitation of intellectual property rights – often preventing further reuse and adaptation of research. A system that is buttressed by liberal humanist conceptions of individual original authorship and dominated by Global North epistemologies that are continuously reproduced and normalised in exclusionary ways, structurally excluding different voices and ways of knowing. It is this legacy system that is increasingly failing academia and the kind of knowledge sharing it requires, which makes it crucial that we experiment with alternative, more ethical, and equitable ways of sharing knowledge and working together within academia and with communities outside of the academy, to better reflect the more communal and processual ways we actual conduct research, produce knowledge, and share it. This would involve foregrounding a different way of engaging with research and publishing and re-evaluating what counts as scholarship.

As I outlined in the previous section, often what are perceived as failures in experimental publishing can be explained in relation to issues of (lacking) academic labour, to not enough time and funding being available to experiment with new forms of publishing. Yet again, instead of seeing this as a failure on the part of experimental forms of publishing, we could also perceive this as a systemic failure where there has been a lack of investment by academic institutions and by large publishing companies in new modes of publication. Many of the more exciting experiments in academic publishing have hence been conducted by scholarly communities and by small, not-for-profit, scholar-led publishers, often based on volunteer labour and/or with the support of forward-looking funders (Adema and Moore 2021). What is important here to emphasise is that failure is generative, and that the failure of the legacy system has also brought people together to imagine otherwise and to work on setting up new publishing models based on collective action, mutual reliance, and cooperation.2

Embracing Failure

While there is a need to be more transparent about failure in experimental publishing and to pinpoint where existing publishing systems are actually failing us as academics, there is similarly a need to think through how we can create publishing systems that are more accommodating to failure: to explore how we can introduce more focus on experimentation, process, and failure into our academic communication and publishing structures and institutions, to support and encourage difference and change. To further explore this, it might be fruitful to make connections to and draw upon queer theory, as queer theorists have critiqued accepted and normative definitions of success and failure, interrogating these dichotomies and instead arguing for queer forms of failure. Jack Halberstam, in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), argues that failure provides openings that might allow for new challenges to normative ways of knowing (and living) to emerge. Applying this to publishing means that failure can potentially challenge and question what are commonly upheld as successful forms of research and publishing – and for what reasons. What normative ideas about success get repeated in these constructions?

As Halberstam argues, failure can function here as a counterhegemonic imaginary for knowing. What role can experimental publishing play in embracing failure, how can it offer us guides, examples, and imaginaries for more non-conformist and communal forms of publishing, how can it help us try to rethink the hegemonic and humanist notions upon which our publishing systems are build?3 Experimental publishing can play an important role here as an alternative discourse to narratives of innovation that are increasingly structuring and underlying our knowledge domains, where the focus is on creating outcomes or results that are measurable and demonstrable or that serve dynamic economic growth (see also Adema 2021, 178–185).

Similarly, it would be useful if the focus in academia was less on the individual success story (for example, as part of performance assessment systems) of the finalised and published output, product, or object (a book or article) and more on the collaborative processes of failure and success that were encountered along the way. This would help emphasise that research is never an individual endeavour or achievement but is and has always been a collaborative process of knowledge production. It would help de-stigmatise personal failure and the fetishisation of individual excellence in academic audit cultures. Making the processual aspect of scholarship more visible – which includes the way we collaborate, informally communicate, review, and publish our research – and highlighting not only the successes but also the failures that come with this (reclaiming the right to fail), could potentially aid in demystifying the way scholarship is produced, shared, and valued.

References

Adema, Janneke. 2021. Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities. Leonardo. The MIT Press.

Adema, Janneke, and Rebekka Kiesewetter. 2022. ’Combinatorial Books Pilot Case: Introduction to Project Documentation.' Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.ffc4307b.

———. 2022. 'Experimental Book Publishing: Reinventing Editorial Workflows and Engaging Communities.’ Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.8998ab82.

Adema, Janneke, and Samuel A. Moore. 2021. ‘Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production.’ Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16 (1). https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918.

Feldman, Zeena, and Marisol Sandoval. 2018. "Metric Power and the Academic Self: Neoliberalism, Knowledge and Resistance in the British University." tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 16 (1): 214–33. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i1.899.

Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press.

Hall, Gary. 2016. Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities. The MIT Press.

Posada, Alejandro, and George Chen. 2018. ‘Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers.’ In ELPUB 2018, edited by Leslie Chan and Pierre Mounier. University of Toronto, 22-24 June 2018. https://doi.org/10.4000/proceedings.elpub.2018.30.

Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Duke University Press.