On Friday, February 21, 2020, several members of the HuMetricsHSS team (Chris Long, Nicky Agate, Jason Rhody, and Penny Weber) were pleased to join a group of more than 25 scholars at the University of Iowa for a workshop. Our workshops focus on rethinking what counts as scholarship and imagining together new ways to measure scholarly production beginning from a shared set of values. Organized in collaboration with Teresa Mangum (Professor of English and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies) and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, which she directs, we spent a full and productive day working our way through the steps that are now shaping up to be the core of the workshop activities: evaluating how academic labor is often spent and how it is rewarded; shifting from a “product” orientation to a “process” orientation toward scholarly work; engaging in a robust consideration of the values that drive our work, both individually and collectively; and working to build approaches to evaluation based on those values.
We have several more in-person workshops planned later in the year, and we are also refining our workshop materials so others can host their own. More on that soon!
Update! After the workshop, the Obermann Center posted this extensive article about the event, which provides a wonderful overview for anyone interested in the workshop.