An age of metrics

Interesting in light of the ERA journal rankings exercise in Australia: this, from Jeremy Hunsinger via the IAMCR....

Journals under Threat: A Joint Response from History of Science,
Technology and Medicine Editors

We live in an age of metrics. All around us, things are being standardized, quantified, measured. Scholars concerned with the work of science and technology must regard this as a fascinating and crucial practical, cultural and intellectual phenomenon. Analysis of the roots and meaning of metrics and metrology has been a preoccupation of much of the best work in our field for the past quarter century at least. As practitioners of the interconnected disciplines that make up the field of science studies we understand how significant, contingent and uncertain can be the
process of rendering nature and society in grades, classes and numbers. We now confront a situation in which our own research work is being subjected to putatively precise accountancy by arbitrary and unaccountable agencies.

Some may already be aware of the proposed European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), an initiative originating with the European Science Foundation. The ERIH is an attempt to grade journals in the humanities - including "history and philosophy of science". The initiative proposes a league table of academic journals, with premier, second and third divisions. According to the European Science Foundation, ERIH "aims initially to identify, and gain more visibility for, top-quality European Humanities research published in academic journals in, potentially, all European languages". It is hoped "that ERIH will form the backbone of a fully-fledged research information system for the Humanities".

What is meant, however, is that ERIH will provide funding bodies and other agencies in Europe and elsewhere with an allegedly exact measure of research quality. In short, if research is published in a premier league journal it will be recognized as first rate; if it appears somewhere in the lower divisions, it will be rated (and not funded) accordingly.

This initiative is entirely defective in conception and execution. Consider the major issues of accountability and transparency. The process of producing the graded list of journals in science studies was overseen by a committee of four. This committee cannot be considered representative. It was not selected in consultation with any of the various disciplinary organizations that currently represent our field such as the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the British Society for the History of Science, the History of Science Society, the Philosophy of Science Association, the Society for the History of Technology or the Society for Social Studies of Science. Journal editors were only belatedly informed of the process and its relevant criteria or asked to provide any information regarding their publications. No indication given of the means through which the list was compiled; nor how it might be maintained in the future. The ERIH depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of conduct and publication of research in our field, and in the humanities in general. Journals' quality cannot be separated from their contents and their review processes. Great research may be published anywhere and in any language. Truly ground-breaking work may be more likely to appear from marginal, dissident or unexpected sources, rather than from a well-established and entrenched mainstream.

Our journals are various, heterogeneous and distinct. Some are aimed at a broad, general and international readership, others are more specialized in their content and implied audience. Their scope and readership say nothing about the quality of their intellectual content. The ERIH, on the other hand, confuses internationality with quality in a way that is particularly prejudicial to specialist and non-English language journals.

In a recent report, the British Academy, with judicious understatement, concludes that "the European Reference Index for the Humanities as presently conceived does not represent a reliable way in which metrics of peer-reviewed publications can be constructed"( Peer Review: the Challenges for the Humanities and Social Sciences, September 2007). Such exercises as ERIH can become self- fulfilling prophecies. If such measures as ERIH are adopted as metrics by funding and other agencies, then many in our field will conclude that they have little choice other than to limit their publications to journals in the premier division. We will sustain fewer journals, much less diversity and impoverish our discipline. Along with many others in our field, this Journal has concluded that we want no part of this dangerous and misguided exercise.

This joint Editorial is being published in journals across the fields of history of science and science studies as an expression of our collective dissent and our refusal to allow our field to be managed and appraised in this fashion. We have asked the compilers of the ERIH to remove our journals' titles from their lists.

Hanne Andersen (Centaurus)
Roger Ariew & Moti Feingold (Perspectives on Science)
A. K. Bag (Indian Journal of History of Science)
June Barrow-Green & Benno van Dalen (Historia mathematica)
Keith Benson (History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences)
Marco Beretta (Nuncius)
Michel Blay (Revue d'Histoire des Sciences)
Cornelius Borck (Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (Science, Technology and Human Values)
Massimo Bucciantini & Michele Camerota (Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies)
Jed Buchwald and Jeremy Gray (Archive for History of Exacft Sciences)
Vincenzo Cappelletti & Guido Cimino (Physis)
Roger Cline (International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology)
Stephen Clucas & Stephen Gaukroger (Intellectual History Review)
Hal Cook & Anne Hardy (Medical History)
Leo Corry, Alexandre Métraux & Jürgen Renn (Science in Context)
D.Diecks & J.Uffink (Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics)
Brian Dolan & Bill Luckin (Social History of Medicine)
Hilmar Duerbeck & Wayne Orchiston (Journal of Astronomical History & Heritage)
Moritz Epple, Mikael Hård, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger & Volker Roelcke (NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin)
Steven French (Metascience)
Willem Hackmann (Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society)
Bosse Holmqvist (Lychnos) Paul Farber (Journal of the History of Biology)
Mary Fissell & Randall Packard (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
Robert Fox (Notes & Records of the Royal Society)
Jim Good (History of the Human Sciences)
Michael Hoskin (Journal for the History of Astronomy)
Ian Inkster (History of Technology)
Marina Frasca Spada (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science)
Nick Jardine (Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
Trevor Levere (Annals of Science)
Bernard Lightman (Isis)
Christoph Lüthy (Early Science and Medicine)
Michael Lynch (Social Studies of Science)
Stephen McCluskey & Clive Ruggles (Archaeostronomy: the Journal of Astronomy in Culture)
Peter Morris (Ambix)
E. Charles Nelson (Archives of Natural History)
Ian Nicholson (Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences)
Iwan Rhys Morus (History of Science)
John Rigden & Roger H Stuewer (Physics in Perspective)
Simon Schaffer (British Journal for the History of Science)
Paul Unschuld (Sudhoffs Archiv)
Peter Weingart (Minerva)
Stefan Zamecki (Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki)

Suffer the children

In NZ, the election campaign (polling on 8 November)is well and truly into a serious phase, with Helen Clark and John Key now neck and neck according to latest polls. Clark scored well on early impressions by pitching the Labour campaign at the question of trust, playing neatly to the fact that Key has an unfortunate shiftiness and hesitancy compared to Clarke's calm, unwavering, if wooden manner. No doubt Key's minders will be putting in some serious hours on media training to overcome his impediment.

Meanwhile perennial public interest in the role of Laura Norder in society, as well as the illegality of corporal punishment of minors for correction, has surged back to bolster support for the conservative National Party. Shame on NZ: we moved out of the Dark Ages and took steps towards addressing a culture of violence with the repeal of clause 59 (permitting "reasonable force" in the disciplining of children) in The Crimes Act 1961. There is no reason to re-visit this step in the right direction, despite the wish of some to link a restraint of physical correction in the home to a moral breakdown in society. "I smack my 14 year old son!" a mother of five was quoted as saying in the Herald this morning. I wonder how effective that is? I wonder how she feels as she does it - satisfied? Is her outrage that her adolescent child misbehaves somehow quelled? Will smacking help if he simply runs away? And why does she think this is going to make any diference when the crucial years for his moral development are long gone?

Let the the Moral Majority ride roughshod in the US, where Sarah Palin, the most frighteningly inexperienced politician on the planet, enjoys strong support for her appeal to motherhood and apple pie. Puh-lease.

Shift happens

There seem to be many versions of this apocalyptic YouTube presentation – the UK one seems better than others.





They originate with a 2006 piece called Did You Know 2.0...
...which includes this hoary old reference:
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

I’ve seen this reference to Einstein many times ..never quite grasped it: do we create problems by thinking? Or by not thinking? Seems over-rated as a revelation, to me. Anyhoo – another idea attributed to Einstein was used in a graduation address today, and I liked it better:
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift
And the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honours the servant
And has forgotten the gift."

These proselytising YouTube variations on a future/education theme kinda remind me of that Michael Wesch one that did the rounds a year or so ago – I still like it: A Vision of Students Today. Worth a re-view. Especially in times of sinking lids on budgets, and inducements to have larger classes.
The Machine is Us/ing Us is good too, of course, even if no longer fresh out of the wrapper.

Cloud computing

…is my phrase du jour. I can relate readily to the idea that “cloud" services …offload computing or data storage functions to someone else's server, allowing e-mail, photos, or documents to be accessed anywhere….”

In using delicious.com for my bookmarks, web-based e-mail, blogging and a clutch of social networking sites, I am being liberated from the constraints of hardware. Cool. I look forward to being in Denmark soon, able – I hope – to access my customised universe from wherever I happen to be. A student remarked as we discussed this briefly that it’s an aspect of being / becoming a global citizen… Yes but the downside is that in volunteering all this data relating to my interests and behaviours I am contributing to the great and unsubtle commercial processes that read my identity and target me with ever-greater and more alarming precision.

i-Candy

...at 'receiver' online, a nice art garden to rest your eyes. Works best if you move the mouse over the image. If you haven't read receiver, you might enjoy it. In its early days, maybe 4 years ago, it didn't have the vodafone tag.

Thought for the day: "Home is where I'm wired less." I wish...

Embracing Matilda

Two days after the news that one of my offspring and partner are to spend four months in Brisbane working to save money, a strong migration flow from NZ to Australia featured in the Weekend Herald’s “The Ozzification of NZ”. The estimated number of NZ citizens living in Australia is now 450,000, roughly 2% of the Australian population, and 12% of New Zealand’s.

The Herald (13 September, page B2) also cites findings of a 2005 study among 300 Kiwis living in Australia by researchers Mary Power and Alison Green from Bond University. Bond and Green reported on this study at our own ANZCA conference in Christchurch that year. They found Kiwis retained a strong attachment to their NZ identity.

Elsewhere in the Herald’s “meet the Kaussies” feature exploring and envisioning a shared future, is an interesting comment from expat Kiwi Rob Levison. He thinks “New Zealand looks to Australia as Australia looks to America or China. Australia doesn’t look back at New Zealand.” In aiming to be an effective head of an Australasian association, I find this image helpful, for it does speak aptly of our different perspectives. Add Power and Green’s research implying Kiwi expats look back longingly to New Zealand to Levison's image of us all shading our eyes as we look to the north, and we must conclude that although much binds us in ANZCA as ‘kaussie' academics, we gaze in different directions in a nationhood sense.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

David Byrne & Brian Eno's album Everything That Happens makes for an enjoyable listen, especially if you were young-ish during the heyday of Talking Heads...

The $1.3 billion-dollar poem

Hey they've got an idea to blow the debate about humanities, arts and social sciences funding out of the water in the US, according to The Onion - secure big bucks for the construction of a poem....

Shared issues

I arrived in Canberra expecting the proposed journal rankings to be the hot issue, closely followed by the “Excellence in Research for Australia” (ERA) initiative – offspring of the late and not-much-lamented Research Quality Framework (RQF). As it turned out, neither of these were preoccupations. Nevertheless it seems to me, wearing a trans-Tasman hat as I do, that we should look at the issues as having much in common. I mean New Zealand has laboured under a Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) since 2002, having now had two assessment rounds. and has recently been independently reviewed. What do we now know about such research quality assurance systems? A report by reviewer Dr Jonathan Adams recommends a number of changes, while Adams’s review of the UK system, the RAE, is available on the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) website and tells us interesting unintended outcomes such as that “a deleterious effect of the RAE has been to cause all institutions to focus on their research performance …whether or not this was a primary part of their underlying mission” (Adams report p. 27).

On the plane to Sydney and Canberra I read of the Bradley Review, and vice-chancellors talking of the need for Australian universities to specialise and merge. Canberra’s Professor Parker put it that “in the long term the number of universities needs to be cut from 40 to perhaps 20 or 30 to make the sector sustainable and give institutions the scale and clout to compete internationally”.

A shudder of déja vu. "Hard choices…a hard look…market forces. New Zealand higher education has been characterised by this type of language for some time, emanating from the Tertiary Education Commission. We are required to differentiate ourselves and meet regional needs: worthy goals I think we would all agree. We may not behave competitively? Tell that to the faculty deans and marketing staff! Tell that to the universities who use dubious tactics to manipulate the PBRF system and scrap over the top positions in the league tables.

Of elegance and the funding trough

Just because of what, and where, it was ... a dinner in the airy 1920s setting of the Members' Dining Room in Canberra's Old Parliament House on an evening in Spring ... the gathering of some 150 articulate CHASS people fuelled by copious wine and, on the whole, very good food achieved much for themselves, their fields of interest and their organisations. It fair bubbled along. But enough of the fun. Out of diverse HASS sector interests must come shared views about the purpose of HASS research and education alongside that of the science and technology sector: a tall order when herding together researchers, funders, and the real world, all of whom arrive at the funding trough with different agendas. And so to the following day.

CHASS President Stuart Cunningham's overview of the importance of "the HASS disciplines" as he calls them was forceful, and his shaping of this "HASS on the Hill" event was directed towards knowing its collective mind better. He viewed this year as the first significant consultation exercise CHASS had undertaken. And so in rapid-fire sequence we heard from a number of speakers from the sectors including The Australian Research Council's Krishna Sen, who reckoned that large parts of HASS do not take advantage of the available research funding, and that international partnerships should be pursued. Given Cunningham's goal of "knowing the collective mind", he may have found after the day's events that the remit of CHASS as it stands is too broad ... its endeavours to be inclusive and representative is problematic... and the membership too wide.

Glenn Withers, CE of Universities Australia opened his address citing JK Galbraith's "Art has nothing to do with the sterner preoccupations of the economist..." (which appears in his other writings - I confess: I googled). He defended what he called a functionalist approach (i.e. lobbying), as some people must do it to enable others to do their creative thing. Anne Byrne's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research views CHASS as a partner, a source of advice, expecting collaboration. Like Sen, Byrne believes international partnerships need to be built up, but in the end, evidence of "delivery on outcomes" is needed. So much industry-speak.

President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Ian Donaldson, drew attention to some overlap between the interests and activities of the AAH and CHASS, while on the other hand the AAH is not representative, since fellows are elected in an exhaustive process assuring their standing as scholars at the highest international levels. Therefore it is an organisation of "mid-career and later" individuals. AAH wants to recognise the new and the evolving - but it is not "a perfectly balanced body" in terms of demographics, an elegant rationale for an ageing association if ever I heard one. Whereas CHASS, he said admiringly, has achieved that desirable inclusivity in four years while taking a coordinating and consulting role in the sector - roles appreciated by the AAH. This, said Donaldson, is the primary role for the CHASS. He congratulated the Council on the remarkable distance it has travelled in a short time, bringing vigour and visibility to the sector. A draft MOU to clarify the relationship between AAH and CHASS is in process; meanwhile CHASS has "earned the right to move forward in a more focused, selective way".

Faith Trent from the DASSH (Deans of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities) was more explicit in her challenge to those present to unpick the various 'sector' references - what is it we are really talking about? The sectors elide to a certain extent. Importantly, there is a risk that where multiple voices are present, politicians either pick the one they like, or listen to none. What issues should CHASS pursue? It can't advocate for everything. What about high workloads and no time for research - a topic Trent noted was not mentioned by anyone on this occasion? I liked her argument that we need to find ways to bring common agendas together: CHASS is important, as is John Byron's question about the 'C' in CHASS (Council). Is it the right noun? Everyone understands the HASS, but the C may not express what it should. The role of 'bridge' between what happens within the universities and the outside is also important. CHASS must know what it is advocating for.

Even better: the stirring approach of Sue Willis, President of the Australian Council of Deans of Education - "one of the largest sector groups". She remarked that the role of advocate doesn't mean being an advocate for the members, per se, but for what we stand for. It means producing our own narrative, rather than amplifying those of members. Also - not just promoting the contribution of the sector, but ensuring it; not simply saying "me, too" (at the trough), but rather trying to define the terms of reference. CHASS hasn't done a good enough job yet, Willis thinks. As incoming president of ANZCA, I sense some resonances.

Finally - there was more, but this is enough - a practical suggestion from Julianne Schultz, editor of Griffith Review. Develop a national database about HASS careers: currently people have to plough through all the university handbooks. Hear, hear.

Here we go...floating some observations from the HASS on the Hill

The Council for the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences (CHASS) event in Canberra 2-3 September was a full-on programme of reflections on the centrality of "the HASS disciplines" to solutions for today's big problems. If this is a given, then the HASS sector should be lobbying for a more equitable slice of the research funding pie, so that the science and technology sector is not defining and solving problems in isolation. It was clear that CHASS has become a vigorous lobby group in the space of only 4 years, taking charge of the terms of the debate rather than whingeing. Holding the lunch at the National Press Gallery so that we could be exposed to Senator Kim Carr's address, and vice versa, was a master stroke in that regard. "My aim in innovation is not to flood the country with shiny gadgets, but to change the culture. Of course we will need new technologies to answer the challenges and grasp the opportunities that lie before us. But we will also need new institutions, new forms of community - new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. In all of this, the humanities, arts and social sciences are critical." (Speech by Senator the Hon. Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research at the National Press Club, 3 September 2008).

Attendees formed a somewhat homogeneous crowd: urbane, congenial, charming, ageing. This is not to denigrate but merely to observe that the academic / research stakeholder community as represented by CHASS, DASSH (Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), the ARC and others, was conspicuously lacking in the spirit - and spiritedness - of youth. Where is the voice of the emerging researcher in all of this debate about funding and innovation?