Today is the first day of the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute, where I’m heading up a team that’s focusing on HuMetrics: Building Humane Metrics for the Humanities. Our team has focused a lot on the importance of working out loud, of process over product, and agreed that we would each take 20 minutes once or twice a day to blog, pomodoro style, about what we’ve been up to. In other words, don’t expect polished prose; this is pre-alpha humetrics-in-the-making.
One of the things we’re trying to do is work out what should be valued in humanities scholarship, which is in part about what could count toward tenure and promotion of course, but is much more importantly about what our resident philosopher (Christopher Long) told us the ancient Greeks called arete, or excellence in practice. What are the values that would enrich and improve humanities scholarship? (The idea being that later this week, we’ll be able to answer such questions as, “How can humanists’ practices better reflect those values?” and “What kind of incentive/metrics system would encourage humanities scholars to embody those practices?”)
What are we missing? Which values should we embody in our practice to enrich humanities scholarship?
Follow team #HuMetrics as we wrestle with humanities metrics. We are Christopher Long, Rebecca Kennison, Stacy Konkiel, Simone Sacchi, Jason Rhody, and Nicky Agate, and we’ll be writing here all week.