Learning How To Fail Better: Resilience in Digital Humanities Projects

Any project is vulnerable to some degree of failure, and the use of new methodologies or technologies can increase this risk. So when projects go wrong, what can we learn? Are Digital Humanities projects more resilient than others? Or are they more likely to hit roadblocks?

In this talk, Dr James Cummings investigates the nature of project failings instead of the glowing reports sent to funding bodies, using examples from some of the Digital Humanities projects he has been involved with over the last two decades. It is hoped that by confronting past failures straight-on, we will be able to more comprehensively plan for it in the future. Dr Cummings has mainly been involved with projects following the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, an open international standard for the representation of digital text, and this talk will include a short high-level overview of the TEI and is accessible to those with no experience in Digital Humanities or TEI.

James Cummings is a Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities for the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He studies digital technology for scholarly editing and publication, as well as the surviving records of late-medieval drama. One of his main research interests in late-medieval drama has always been the Records of Early English Drama project (REED), especially its shift to digital technologies. For the last 15 years, he has been an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium's Technical Council and is now an elected member of its Board of Directors.