Dean Unsworth’s essay lays out how to formulate digital projects that perform research as well as how to write about them. He says that digital projects (archives, editions, databases, etc.) ought to be able “to declare the terms of their potential success or failure”: chances are, such an explanation is only possible if the scholars really know what they are trying to accomplish. Moreover, real research is only being done if the possibility of failure exists. “Failure” in the research proposal, “We want to know X,” means being able to conclude after research has been performed, “we can’t know X for the following reasons, but we can know Y.” Even interpretive projects follow this rule. One is frequently thrilled to find an essay or book that implements the most thorough analysis of a particular text via one particular methodology because it allows one to see how far that particular theoretical vantage point will take us, and where it breaks down or becomes uninteresting. And Dean Unsworth insists that the methodology be formulated and stated explicitly for such projects. Once again, no matter what the result, the digital project is a success insofar as it implements that methodology to the utmost and reveals what results can and cannot be had from it. However, Professor Unsworth admits, this kind of successful failure is not really suitable for institutional consumption: “Frankly, the only metric that is likely to matter to the universities that sponsor such projects is their success in attracting outside funding, but scholars, designers, and funding agencies ought to care about more than those simple intrinsic criteria.”
When I teach literature classes, I say to my students that their essays are “essaies” in the French sense of the word: they are trials. I tell students, you’ll have your thesis, and you’ll try to prove it by quoting the text, but when you get to the end, if you no longer believe your thesis, that too is an excellent result. You tried it, and it didn’t work, and now you know that that idea, followed as far as you can take it, doesn’t work. What an amazing thing, really, to know that an idea you had while reading was really YOUR idea and not the author’s, that the idea is not in fact supported by the text. So, I say, if you don’t believe your thesis by the end of the paper, just say so, and I’ll give you an A. But are these the kind of concluding white-papers expected by the NEH? And there is no need to idealize the sciences: we know how much data has been falsified for purposes of funding and prestige. The social consumption of research sometimes contaminates it the way TB infects the lungs.
So what kinds of success and failure (success from failure) do we want from mappings of the sort undertaken by Professor Muri? Her work parallels that undertaken by Fiona Black and Bertram Macdonald, the SSHRC-funded History of the Book in Canada project ( (External Link) ). It begins as a series of published volumes about this history, and will end as a GIS project, mapping information given in the following chart: This chart and the subsequent information about this project come from Bertrum H. MacDonald and Fiona A. Black, “Using GIS for Spatial and Temporal Analyses in Print Culture Studies,” Social Science History 24.3 (Fall 2000): 505-535, p. 510.