The Working Group Impact Factors and Success Criteria, chaired by Juliane Stiller, received funding in the context of the Working Funding Scheme 2017-2018 to organise a workshop on the theme Measuring Change in Digital Humanities. The workshop was held on June 21 and 22 2018 at Humboldt University of Berlin with 35 attendees from Germany and other European countries. The main goal of the workshop was to determine different perspectives and approaches on the topic of impact in social sciences and humanities. Thanks to the traveling grant from DARIAH-EU, 10 speakers with different scientific backgrounds were invited to present the projects they were working on as well as their views on impact factors in social sciences and, in particular, in the use of research infrastructures.
Francesca Morselli presenting during the session on infrastructures.
The program of this two-days workshop included a keynote by Leonie van Drooge (Rathenau Instituut, Netherlands) introducing the concept of impact, followed by a panel session hosting three representatives of Research Infrastructures: Francesca Morselli (DARIAH-EU) who presented the collaborative framework and impact of the DARIAH working groups; Frank Uiterwaal introduced the infrastructure project PARTHENOS and its impact on the humanities research and Steven Krauwer gave a good overview of the impact research infrastructures such as CLARIN can have on the scientific landscape and research results. The day concluded with a session on frameworks and tools for measuring impact in social sciences and humanities: this session was introduced by David Budtz Pedersen (Aalborg University) who argued the need for a responsible impact measurement; then Klaus Thoden (DARIAH-EU Working Group Impact Factors and Success Criteria) introduced the Impactomatrix, a tool (which offers a matrix of evaluation measures) that the researcher can apply to her/ his own research in order to identify and reach the right type of impact; Julia Fallon from Europeana talked about her experience in developing with the community the impact playbook for the cultural heritage sector; and finally, Birge Wolf (Universität Kassel) and Stefan Lossow (Disy Informationssysteme GmbH) introduced the SynSICRIS tool that supports the measurement and assessment of social benefits of applied research.
Breakout session with Birge Wolf and Stefan Lossow.
The next day started with panel presentations, chaired by Esther de Smet (Ghent University), on areas of impact for social sciences and humanities: Trilce Navarrete (Erasmus University Rotterdam) presented how cultural heritage and the participation of society can create economic impact and how; Jane Tinklers (Nine Dots Prize) spoke about the impact of SSH research on policy-making and introduced the Nine Dots Prize (a competition for unpublished research in the Social Science); Jens Bley (HafenCity University) focused on the ongoing digital transformation of the city of Hamburg and its impact on its citizens.
In the last session of the workshop, Helen Small (University of Oxford) introduced the case-study approach to measuring research impact. It was followed by a discussion led by Maxi Kindling (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Dirk Wintergrün (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) with the goal of collecting the main outcomes of the workshop and bring them together in documentation for future reference.
The workshop was a valuable project for bringing together scientists from different disciplines discussing impact beyond the infrastructure perspective. The participants valued the insights into different domains and it was a space of exchange and potential for future collaborations. Also, the Working Group Impact Factors and Success Criteria managed to gather feedback on the Impactomatrix tool, that could be incorporated and improved in the future.
All the slides of the presentations and documentation are made available to see and download at Zenodo. The keynote presentation by Leonie van Drooge, as well as the talks by David Budtz Pedersen and Helen Small were recorded by an initiative of Berlin School of Library and Information Science (provision of the equipment) and the PARTHENOS project and are publicly available.
This post is part of the Working Groups Stories series presenting results and outcomes from the Working Group Funding Scheme 2017-2018.
