CAS Digital Humanities Seminar Series: “Exploring the Conversation: Alt-Metrics and Scholarly Uses of Social Media”
A lecture by Dr Ernesto Priego
In A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections on a Year of Books Alberto Manguel (2011) wrote that he thought the books on his shelves had no knowledge of his existence. “They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don’t know that I am their reader.” In spite of it still being an emergent phenomenon in some academic circles, social media is changing the way readers and the publications they read interact, and social media mentions can be one of the ways in which scholarship available online truly comes to life.
How can alternative digital methods of scholarly assessment maximise the public impact of academic research? How do researchers and the public engage in online attention to academic research in different fields and why does it matter? Can evaluating this engagement contribute to providing reliable evidence of research impact outside academia?
Alt-metrics, as the quantitative and qualitative “study and use of scholarly impact measures based on activity in online tools and environments” (Priem et al 2012) , has until now primarily focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Understandably, on the other hand, there has been some resistance from scholars in the humanities and social sciences to what might be called a renewed conflict of the faculties: the perceived threat of quantitative approaches becoming the paradigmatic model for the evaluation of all other academic disciplines and outputs. Indeed, some humanities scholars and commentators have opposed to the quantification of what, it has been argued, cannot be measured.
In this seminar Dr Ernesto Priego (Lecturer in Library Science, City University London) will discuss the role of alt-metrics in offering insight on what articles, when, with whom and in what way scholars are sharing the most, and as a way of encouraging new and different forms of scholarly behaviour, online and offline.
The seminar will be followed by refreshments in the Highfield House Cloisters.