The workshop “Measuring Change in Digital Humanities: Workshop on Impact Factors and Success Criteria” was organised by Juliane Stiller at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (IBI), with funding from DARIAH-EU, in June 2018. The workshop brought together international experts, including members of the PARTHENOS project, such as Frank Uiterwaal (Parthenos, NIOD, Netherlands), Francesca Morselli (DARIAH-EU, DANS, Netherlands), Steven Krauwer (CLARIN, Netherlands), and Dr Ulrike Wuttke (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany).
“Measuring change, impact, and success in the Digital Humanities is highly relevant as currently there are no commonly agreed criteria to measure success and impact of Digital Humanities research and research infrastructures”, says Dr. Juliane Stiller (IBI).
Lecture videos playlist from the Workshop on Impact Factors and Success Criteria.
The following three lectures were filmed by the Parthenos Training team as training materials:
- Leonie van Drooge (Rathenau Institut, Netherlands): “The impacts of research infrastructures”
Leonie van Drooge discusses the wide variety of impacts of research infrastructures. She underlines that the impact of a research infrastructure depends on what is expected and intended from it and the perspectives of the several stakeholder involved and exemplifies how the evidence to prove the impact of a research infrastructure should relate to its goals, intentions and expectations, and that it can relate to final impacts as well as activities, choices and processes preceding impacts.
- David Budtz Pedersen (Aalborg Universitet, Denmark): “Responsible Impact Assessment in SSH”
David Pudtz Pedersen introduces the key building blocks for designing responsible impact assessments by allowing research organisations to have significant influence on how their impact is represented and communicated. He outlines a new approach to assessing a wide range of research activities and its consequences for wider networks of policy-making, funding and research support and shows that there is room for researchers, universities and funding agencies to establish impact assessment tools directed towards specific “missions” while avoiding catch-all indicators and universal metrics.
- Helen Small (University of Oxford, UK): “Use case approach to impact measurement”
Helen Small addresses purposes and evolving formats of a case-study based approach to research impact measurement. She uses two examples related to Digital Humanities research from the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) at the faculty of English at Oxford University. She pays special attention to the kinds of data that make for more and less persuasive evidence of the impact claimed, its scope, and its significance.
The lecture videos have been filmed and produced by Dr Ulrike Wuttke (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (FHP)) and they are part of the submodules on “Impact” within the Parthenos Training modules “Introduction to Research Infrastructures” and “Management Challenges in Research Infrastructures”.
They can be also found in the PARTHENOS YouTube Channel.
This post is authored by Dr Ulrike Wuttke and republished from Parthenos website.
