Mellon Grant to Support Values-Based Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences

CC-BY Nicky Agate / Medium

I’m excited to announce that the HuMetricsHSS research team–which I was a part of at the 2016 TriangleSCI conference–has received the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue our work of encouraging the discovery and use of “humane” research evaluation metrics for the humanities and social sciences.

HSS scholars are increasingly frustrated by the prevalence of the use of evaluation metrics (borrowed from the sciences) that do not accurately capture the impacts of their work. Our grand vision is to develop better metrics, ones that are rooted in the values that are important to scholars. This grant-funded research is a start.

From the press release:

“We are reverse-engineering the way metrics have operated in higher education,” said Christopher P. Long, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University and one of the Principal Investigators (PIs) of the Mellon-funded project. “We begin not with what can be measured technologically, but by listening to scholars themselves as they identify the practices of scholarship that enrich their work and connect it to a broader public.”

We’ll be sharing updates on the HuMetricsHSS project from our website and on Twitter, so please follow along!

Much gratitude to the Mellon Foundation for supporting HuMetricsHSS.