Translating Value: Experiments in Assessment for New Forms of Humanities Research

Workshop Presentation
Emily Schmitt,  Kristin Hass  

Among the most compelling new directions in humanities scholarship in the last 20 years are an increased emphasis on collaborative research, more sophisticated community engagement, and an expanded range of forms of dissemination. Drawing on significant experience over the last few decades at the University of Michigan and building on Ellison and Eatman’s “Scholarship in Public,” the Humanities Collaboratory is developing an archive and toolkit to aid evaluators and evaluatees in performing serious and rigorous assessment of these emerging forms of scholarship. We offer a workshop that introduces participants to this archive and to a prototype of the toolkit we are developing. This workshop also invites participants to think with us about the transferability and translation of new kinds of work in the humanities and the impacts of this work in participant’s local, national, and international contexts. It will be a unique opportunity to engage conference participants from across the globe who find themselves negotiating processes of assessment in a changing landscape while we share our sense of the state of the conversation. In other words, we want to share our work in developing resources and engage with workshop participants to learn from them about their practices and the challenges they face. We will ask them big questions about how they frame their thinking about knowledge production, about peer review, about meaningfully honing their critical skills, and about how scholars articulate the value in the humanities in the academy – all in the service of moving the conversation forward.