HuMetricsHSS Exercise Guidebook

The HuMetricsHSS Exercise Guidebook is a version of our workshop process, designed to be run at your institution, by you and your colleagues.

The following exercises are intended to help you through the process of identifying and defining the values you and your community care about, and then putting those values into practice in the work that you do together. Each exercise contains more granular goals, but the overall process is intended to address a fundamental disconnect between what members of the academy find personally rewarding in their work (helping students, contributing to public knowledge and the advancement of the public good, collaborating with colleagues), what is rewarded by systems of academic incentive (publishing articles, books, or monographs), and what they spend most of their time on (writing emails, defusing interpersonal conflicts, attending meetings). Some of them—listed under “[card games]”—can be used as an individual or in a small group without facilitation. Others, listed under Exercises, are drawn from our in-person and virtual workshops, and are intended to be run by a facilitator for a group of participants.

To support discussions about values, the HuMetricsHSS team has created a set of cards that can be used in a variety of exercises and card games, all of which are described in the guide. The card games can be used as an individual or in a small group without facilitation. The rest of the exercises in the guide are intended to be run by a facilitator for a group of participants, and contain everything you need to do so, including goals, instructions for room set-ups and supplies, estimated times needed for each exercise, and a facilitator script.

You can download versions of the Guidebook below, or order a printed and bound copy at this link.

Download the Guidebook