Kathleen Fitzpatrick is MSU Director of Digital Humanities, and previously served as Director of Scholarly Communication for the Modern Language Association, and has written extensively on critical issues concerning the rise of digital humanities and associated P&T issues.

Presentations

 Session 1 Presentation: What Counts.

Abstract: We strive for objectivity and critical distance in scholarly assessment practices, especially where those assessments are applied to personnel rather than to individual projects. The principle of objectivity is laudable, but it too often leads us to counting things — which is to say, relying on metrics that can be counted — rather than permitting stickier, more complex forms of judgment to enter into the process. This talk will explore some of the problems with an overreliance on metrics, and even “alternate metrics,” in promotion and tenure processes, as well as a few possibilities for establishing richer assessment criteria that are more in alignment with scholarly values.