As more scholars venture beyond the boundaries of traditional print-only scholarship, academia as an institution is beginning to grapple with the implications of scholarship and tenure in the digial era. For example, Christine L. Borgman professor of information studies at UCLA, argues that tenure requirements need to be changed in a digital age. Borgman was recently interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Ed about her new book, Scholarship in the Digital Age. Here’s a snippet of that interview:
Q. In your recent book, “Scholarship in the Digital Age,” you contend that the tenure system needs to reward people for contributions to collaborative digital projects instead of recognizing only those who publish books and articles. Why?
A. Data is becoming a first-class object. In the days of completely paper publication, the article or book was the end of the line. And once the book was in libraries, the data were often thrown away or allowed to deteriorate.
Now we’re in a massive shift. Data become resources. They are no longer just a byproduct of research. And that changes the nature of publishing, how we think about what we do, and how we educate our graduate students. The accumulation of that data should be considered a scholarly act as well as the publication that comes out of it.
The kind of re-thinking data that Brogman calls for is already going on in the humanities. And, in many ways, I think the humanities are light years ahead of the social sciences in the move toward understanding digital scholarship. (Why this is remains a mystery to me, but I digress.) For example, Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, maintains a blog called Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Back in August of this year, Spiro posted has an elaborate and well articulated schema of what “digital scholarship” involves. Drawing on John Unsworth’s notion of scholarly primitives, a description of core research practices including: discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating, and representing, Spiro adds what she calls another crucial scholarly primitive, perhaps the fundamental one: collaboration. She calls this collaborative model of scholarship, such as blogging about scholarship, “social scholarship.”
Yet, even as scholars like Brogman and Spiro challenge us to reconceptualize what counts as scholarship, there seems to be few tenure and promotion committees that sorted out how to award credit to authors for digital work. One of the traditional measures of scholarship for tenure and promotion committees is publication in peer-reviewed journals, and specifically looking at the “impact factor” of the journal. The impact factor is just a way of measuring the visibility that a particular journal has in the field. But, if you take a look at some of the academic blogs that scholars in a number of fields maintain, there’s certainly an impact from those that can be measured and is quantifiable. Take a hypothetical example of a scholar who maintains an academic blog that gets 50,000 readers per month, or creates a video that goes viral and generates upwards of 7 million hits. That hypothetical scholar has also published some in peer-reviewed journals that have less than 1,000 subscribers. Our hypothetical scholar may be much more “visible” as an expert in their field from their blog, their viral video, or other digital projects than from their peer-reviewed publications. Indeed, if what tenure and promotion committees are tasked with evaluating is how well a particular scholar has established a national reputation in their chosen field (and thus, how well they represent the college or university), these committees need to start taking into consideration a scholar’s public presence on the web first and then consider their peer-reviewed publishing as an ancillary or secondary form of evaluation.
At the very least, the digital era is transforming scholarship, that much is true. What the lag time will be between that transformation and the way tenure and promotion decisions are made will depend on how forward thinking the people sitting on those committees choose to be.
Comments 2
Jon Smajda — December 11, 2008
Not surprisingly, I'm generally in agreement here, but I think the tricky part is this:
"Indeed, if what tenure and promotion committees are tasked with evaluating is how well a particular scholar has established a national reputation in their chosen field (and thus, how well they represent the college or university), these committees need to start taking into consideration a scholar’s public presence on the web first"
But isn't the idea that its not national reputation & fame so much as about contributing something new and unique to the state of the field's knowledge? This would be why a peer-reviewed academic publication would be worth more, despite being less influential on one's non-academic reputation and being seen by far less eyeballs. The examples you give (blogs, viral videos, etc.) may or may not advance the state of the field. They could simply be popular presentations of the fields ideas, which is valuable...but not necessarily the primary goal of science.
I'm actually quite skeptical of this ideal, so I'm kind of just playing devil's advocate here. I don't completely buy what I said above about the relative merit of "advancing the field's knowledge" vs. engaging with the public (at least I don't buy it as much as most academics probably do), but I do think this is the crux of the problem. The answer, IMHO, is to move the spaces for academic contributions online and into the public sphere. I suspect and hope that if we did that, eventually our academic publishing efforts and our public engagement efforts would converge a bit more than they do now.
Jessie Daniels — December 16, 2008
Hmm.... I've been mulling this over. I suppose that I should amend what I said in the original post to read that the goal of granting tenure to someone is that they've both "created new knowledge" and built a national reputation. The thing that seems different to me about the Internet-era, is that some people are creating new knowledge through the medium, not just popularizing knowledge they (or, others) have created. Here, I'm thinking more of the Web 2.0 video that went viral, rather than the "last lecture" that also went viral. In the case of the Web 2.0 video, the person that created it didn't have tenure at the time (not sure if he does now), but I had several conversations with colleagues about "how would you evaluate that" if you were on a T&P committee. What I think we need to do, and what I meant to suggest in my post, is that we need to expand the kinds of things that "count." Perhaps this only applies to the social sciences where we've been rather narrow in what we consider. Perhaps what we need to do is be more expansive like our colleagues in the fine arts who consider all sorts of "products" as evidence of productive scholarship.