RECOMMENDED: Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship

Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship, edited by Anna-Maria Sichani (University of London), Michael Donnay (Software Sustainability Institute), is a new open access volume published by University of London Press. This volume asks “if there is value in failure in digital scholarship, how do we create the space to fail ‘better’?” By positioning failure as an ordinary part of digital scholarship, and indeed all scholarship, the volume seeks to create a “critical, constructive and compassionate vocabulary for failure” and normalize failure as part of the process of engaging in digital humanities. From the book description:

Failure is ordinary. From technological failures and computational obsolescence to rejected applications and challenging collaborations, failure is an unavoidable part of any scholarly endeavour. This is especially true for digital scholarship, as the everyday risk of failure is compounded by the challenges of interdisciplinary research and fragility of digital technology.

Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship tackles what failure – in all its messy but immensely valuable complexity – means for the digital humanities community head-on. It brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary and international group of scholars and practitioners that each offer short personal and professional reflections on the failed, broken or challenging aspects of scholarly practice. It provides a critical perspective on the ways institutional and material conditions are intractably linked to approaches to digital research, and how those conditions differ within and across national contexts.