This October, the HuMetricsHSS team is excited to bring together a diverse group of scholars, teachers, administrators, and students from a wide range of institutions for a topic that we believe will transform academia. Over the course of a two-day workshop, we'll interrogate, brainstorm, break apart, add to, and thoroughly revise a proposed set of values to create the beginnings of a framework for assessing a more holistic, accurate interpretation of scholarly "excellence."
The HuMetricsHSS initiative is based on the idea that humanists and social scientists should not content ourselves with existing, faulty evaluation metrics that are based on what's easy to measure (citations, grant dollars awarded, Twitter mentions, etc.) rather than what's important to measure (influence, quality, collaboration, etc). Instead, we believe that it's important to think about what kind of values matter to those of us working in humanities and social science fields — our collective ethos, as it were — and to develop a flexible metrics framework that rewards work that embodies those values. See this post for an example of how this idea might apply to a typical scholarly object: the syllabus.
But we face a major challenge. We are all too aware that our team of six alone cannot give voice to the shared values of a huge and diverse community. That's where you come in.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we're now able to ask students, deans, tenure-line faculty, contingent lecturers, alt-acs, Ph.D. candidates, department heads, and others working in HSS departments at any higher educational institution to apply to help us articulate the shared values of a more equitable and, frankly, excellent academy in East Lansing, Michigan, on October 5–7, 2017. We'll be joined by workshop facilitators Dr. Cameron Neylon (Curtin University) and Dr. Stefanie Haustein (University of Ottawa).
Travel is covered, so if you care about bettering evaluation practices in the humanities and social sciences, please apply to join the workshop by midnight on August 6 by filling out this easy form.
Questions? Drop us a line!