Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908590912 ISBN 13: 9781908590916

Publisher: University of London Press, 2026

Synopsis

Tackles what failure, in all its messy but immensely valuable complexity, means for the digital humanities community.

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

Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary, and international group of scholars and practitioners who 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.

In creating a critical, constructive, and compassionate vocabulary for failure, this book normalizes failure as an object of inquiry, asking what value exists in failure in digital scholarship and how we can create the space to fail better.
 

About this title

About the Authors

Anna-Maria Sichani is a BRAID Research Fellow and a research associate in digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. 

Michael Donnay is a community manager at the Software Sustainability Institute, where he supports the Society of Research Software Engineering and works on projects related to research culture and evaluation. He was the 2022 Ruth Watts Fellow with the History of Education Society, hosting their podcast on interdisciplinary work in the history of education, and he has written on the history of science for Nature Chemistry.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of London Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908590912
• ISBN 13: 9781908590916
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 138
• Editor: Sichani Anna-Maria, Donnay Michael