The Humane Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative is an initiative committed to establishing more humane indicators of excellence in academia, with a particular focus on the humanities and social sciences. The HuMetricsHSS has recently received a $650,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of its work.
The goal of the HuMetricsHSS initiative is to empower people at all levels of academia, by identifying core values and aligning them with reward mechanisms in every area, from grades and funding to promotion and tenure.
Established in 2016, the HumetricsHSS initiative arose from a growing sense that the work by faculty and staff of academic institutions was increasingly driven by opaque and limited assessment mechanisms that reward a narrow scope of activities and fail to recognize the wide array of publicly focused, socially oriented scholarship that motivates faculty, staff, students, and administrators.
This is the third grant the HuMetricsHSS initiative has received from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first, awarded in 2017 for $309,000, allowed for a series of workshops that identified values and practices to enrich scholarship in an effort to better recognise, promote, and nurture scholarly practices. The second Mellon grant, awarded in 2019 for $695,000, funded the first implementation round of the initiative.
Under this latest Mellon grant, over the next 18 months, the HuMetricsHSS initiative will:
- provide models of institutional transformation to demonstrate the potential of values frameworks in applied settings while fostering greater engagement in additional institutions;
- scale-up training and infrastructure to support the use of values frameworks through developing train-the-trainer workshops and by enhancing the HuMetricsHSS toolkit;
- build and expand communities of practice by fostering engaged, cross-pollinating networks through regular communication, facilitating collaboration through knowledge sharing and transparent idea generation, and coordinating with aligned initiatives on messaging and amplification of the work.
The initiative is led by an international group of co-principal investigators from the academic and nonprofit sectors including Christopher Long, Michigan State University, Dean of College of Arts & Letters and Dean of the Honors College; Nicky Agate, University of Pennsylvania, Snyder-Granader Assistant University Librarian for Research Data and Digital Scholarship; Rebecca Kennison, K|N Consultants, Executive Director and Principal; Jason Rhody, Social Science Research Council, Program Director; Simone Sacchi, European University Institute, Open Science Librarian; Bonnie Thornton Dill, University of Maryland, College Park, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and Professor in The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Penny Weber, Social Science Research Council Digital Culture Program, Projects Coordinator, and HuMetricsHSS Project Manager; and Bonnie Russell, Michigan State University, MESH Research and HuMetricsHSS Assistant Project Manager.
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