Tag Archives: Humanities

Open Research in the Humanities: Research Evaluation

September 14, 2022Humanities, research assessmentHumanities, open humanities, research assessmentadmin

Authors: Emma Gilby, Matthias Ammon, Rachel Leow and Sam Moore

This is the sixth and final of a series of blog posts, presenting the reflections of the Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. Read the opening post here. The working group aimed to reframe open research in a way that was more meaningful to humanities disciplines, and their work will inform the University of Cambridge approach to open research. This post discusses opportunities and challenges for research evaluation in the arts and humanities. The direction of travel in the Open Research discussion is away from any straightforward use of metrics in research evaluation. This is hugely in favour of the arts and humanities.

Opportunities

The arts and humanities have never used metrics in the same way as their STEM colleagues. This is partly because of the slower speed of publishing and the in-depth editorial process (18-24 months from submission to publication might be considered standard), and partly because ‘citation indices’ are less relevant when one’s contribution is to be part of a broad, ongoing cultural conversation rather than to generate data from scratch (see above, on CORE data). So the diversification of research evaluation enshrined in DORA (https://sfdora.org), and the questioning of the uncritical use of metrics and altmetrics by administrators, grant funders and promotion committees, is a positive development. It allows for a general move away from established academic platforms and formats, as discussed above.

Support required

Some pressing questions about research evaluation remain, which might account for some perceived hostility from some quarters towards a move away from established academic platforms. Who is doing the work of reading and assessing these multiple new formats? How do we evaluate success? Is success measured in terms of ‘reach’ – number of Twitter followers or blog readers etc? This would take us down the route of clickbait and skew towards already-popular, English-language material; this is a particular danger with processes designed to evaluate web traffic.

What guidance is available for established academics looking to credit other colleagues for their social media contributions, in particular? An anxiety often expressed is that ‘there is a lot of rubbish on the internet’. How do we sift through? In general, research evaluation takes time and effort, and there is a sense that this work needs to be properly measured and quantified. For example, if an evaluator spends 20 minutes per CV on 60 CVs, that is 20 hours of work before one even gets into reading and evaluating actual outputs. In the context of a busy teaching term, such additional labour is barely possible and contributes to a general sense of stress within the profession. Looking for a kind of shorthand to facilitate swift and accurate evaluation of a wide range of (possibly unfamiliar) formats is therefore the pragmatic approach.

The discussion of narrative CVs in the DORA context implies an amalgamation of the traditional CV and the cover letter. In our institution as no doubt in others too, it would be useful to have some HR guidance here on what appointment panels should ask for (e.g. no cover letter, but a paragraph each on a candidate’s three main research achievements?).

There was a feeling in the working group that Cambridge is perhaps behind other universities who make ‘open research’ a category for assessment in itself, and who guide their employment panels and candidates accordingly. Indeed, Cambridge’s traditional division of the criteria for promotion into the discrete categories of ‘research’, ‘teaching’ and ‘general contribution’ seems actively to work against the whole idea of ‘open research’. It suggests unhelpfully that ‘service to the community’, ‘teaching’ and ‘research’ do not overlap. This division seems to have survived the recent overhaul of the academic promotions exercise.

Open Research in the Humanities: public engagement

August 8, 2022HumanitiesHumanities, public engagementadmin

Authors: Emma Gilby, Matthias Ammon, Rachel Leow and Sam Moore

This is the fifth of a series of blog posts, presenting the reflections of the Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. Read the opening post here. The working group aimed to reframe open research in a way that was more meaningful to humanities disciplines, and their work will inform the University of Cambridge approach to open research. This post public engagement in a humanities perspective.

The open access movement is fundamentally about public engagement in its broadest sense. It also allows for reflection on a differentiated notion of ‘public’, where publics can be specific as well as general (‘the general public’) and valued irrespective of size or situation.

Opportunities

The LERU pillars refer to a number of ‘citizen science’ projects where members of the public are actively involved in scientific research through collection and analysis of data. The A&H are also open to this model of public stakeholders co-producing research.

Evidently, many colleagues do outstanding work on social media spaces such as Twitter or Instagram, which are interactive by their very nature. These coexist alongside a more ‘traditional’ model of public engagement that involves the dissemination of research-level content in a ‘festival of ideas’ or other format. Such events tend to be well supported by HE institutions, and in the UK are influenced by the demands of the Research Excellence Framework, as regards the necessity of demonstrating ‘impact’ and producing ‘impact case studies’ (with the downside that the latter often generate spiralling bureaucracy, as the meta-work of proving one’s own impact takes far longer than the impactful activity itself).

Anecdotally, A&H academics are often proudest of the outreach and engagement activities that take place in the modest setting of the school classroom or local library, which embeds them in their communities, although rarely with an audience of more than, say, 25. They would like this work to be valued more than it seems to be currently.

A&H research, like any academic research, can sometimes seem given over to abstruse theoretical language, and it is worth reiterating this larger goal: ‘Scholars in the humanities and social sciences should strive to publish in ways that will make academic research understandable for larger audiences: that is, spell out clearly and concisely its societal relevance and the ethical soundness of its methodology, reduce the use of jargon, use non-textual and other experimental formats.’

Support required

Although there is good support institutionally in Cambridge from e.g. the Public Engagement team and the REF Impact team, some consolidation could be undertaken, as these are seemingly discrete entities. Indeed, Cambridge in particular seems very complex in its training infrastructure, comprising e.g. the Researcher Development team, the Postdoc Academy, the OSC team, the Data Champions, the Digital Humanities team, and so on… This makes it difficult for colleagues to advise each other, and particularly their untenured colleagues.

We also recommend more institutional reflection on how to value and recognize work that engages smaller, local publics as well as work of international renown and import.

Open Research in the Humanities: CORE Data

July 24, 2022Data Champions, Humanities, Open Research at Cambridge ConferenceHumanities, open data, research data managementadmin

Authors: Emma Gilby, Matthias Ammon, Rachel Leow and Sam Moore

This is the third of a series of blog posts, presenting the reflections of the Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. Read the opening post at this link. The working group aimed to reframe open research in a way that was more meaningful to humanities disciplines, and their work will inform the University of Cambridge approach to open research. This post reflects on the concept of FAIR data and proposes an alternative way of thinking about data in the humanities.

As a rule, data in the arts and humanities is collected, organised, recontextualised and explained. We are therefore putting forward this acronym as an alternative to LERU’s FAIR data (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). Our data is collected rather than generated; organised and recontextualised in order to further a cultural conversation about discoveries, methods and debates; and explained as part of the analytical process. Any view of scholarly comms as uniquely about the distribution of and access to FAIR data (‘from my bench to yours’) will seem less relevant to A&H academics. Similarly, the goal of reproducibility of data – in the sense in which this often appears in the sciences and social sciences, where it refers to the results of a study being perfectly replicable when the study is repeated – is, if anything, contrary to the aim of CORE data: i.e. the aim that this data should be built upon and thereby modified through the process of further recontextualization. Our CORE data, then, understood as information used for reference and analysis, is made up of texts, music, pictures, fabrics, objects, installations, performances, etc. Sometimes, this information does not belong to us, but is owned by another person or institution or community, in which case it is not ours to make public.

Opportunities

The A&H tend to bring information together in new ways to further discussion about socio-cultural developments across the globe. Available digital data is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the material that is worked with.[1] Arts and humanities scholars, who spend their lives thinking about the arrangement and communication of information, are acutely aware that archives (digital and otherwise) are not neutral spaces, but man-made and the product of human choices. This means that information available online, to a broadband-enabled public, is asymmetrical and distorted.

One of the main benefits of open research is that it is thought to make data globally accessible, especially to ‘the global south’ and to institutions with fewer available funds to ‘buy data in’. As we explore below (‘research integrity’), this unidirectional view of open access is problematic. In general, digital material tends to reproduce English-speaking structures and epistemologies. As FAIR data is redefined as CORE data, an attention to context will hopefully promote the diverse positions occupied by all those who make up the world and who produce research about it.

Support required

In order usefully to employ CORE data in the A&H, we need to bring to the surface and examine underlying assumptions about knowledge creation as well as knowledge dissemination.

The work of the digital humanities – rooted explicitly in digital technologies and the forms of communication that they enable – is obviously a vital part of these discussions about opening up the CORE data of the humanities. Digital work, in the same way as any other successful A&H research, needs to consider its own materiality and conditions of production, evaluate its own history, draw attention to its own limits, and navigate its trans-temporal relationships with data in other forms (the manuscript, the printed text, the painting, the piece of music). This is a developing field and one that still has an uneasy relationship with the existing tenure/promotions system.[2] Colleagues noted that training needs are evolving constantly. It is often hard to know where to turn for specific guidance in e.g. how to manage one’s own ‘born digital’ archives, how to deconstruct a twitter archive, and so on.

This issue also overlaps with the need, as part of the ‘rewards and incentives’ process outlined below, to evaluate the success of colleagues as they undertake this training and negotiate with these processes. DH is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of research and needs to be widely resourced. But it would also be harmful to collapse all A&H research into ‘the digital humanities’. The work of colleagues whose CORE data is resistant, for whatever reason, to wide online dissemination in English also needs to be allocated the value it deserves: some publics are simply smaller than others.

Postscript: the group subsequently became aware of the CARE Principles of Indigenous Data Governance. These principles will also be considered when developing our services in support of data management and ethical sharing.

[1] Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, ‘The Risk of Losing the Thick Description: Data Management Challenges Faced by the Arts and Humanities in the Evolving FAIR Data Ecosystem’, in Digital Technologies and the Practices of Humanities Research, edited by Jennifer Edmond (Open Book Publishers, 2014), https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0192.10

[2]See the excellent article by Cait Coker and Kate Ozment ‘Building the Women in Book History Bibliography, or Digital Enumerative Bibliography as Preservation of Feminist Labor’, Digital Humanities Quarterly 13 (3), 2019, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/3/000428/000428.html – where the authors of the ‘Women in Book History’ digital bibliography still see the tenure system as ‘monograph-driven’, and had to fund their research through selling merchandise.