Making visible the invisible through the analysis of acknowledgements in the humanities

Purpose: Science is subject to a normative structure that includes how the contributions and interactions between scientists are rewarded. Authorship and citations have been the key elements within the reward system of science, whereas acknowledgements, despite being a well-established element in scholarly communication, have not received the same attention. This paper aims to put forward the bearing of acknowledgements in the humanities to bring to the foreground contributions and interactions that, otherwise, would remain invisible through traditional indicators of research performance. Design/methodology/approach: The study provides a comprehensive framework to understanding acknowledgements as part of the reward system with a special focus on its value in the humanities as a reflection of intellectual indebtedness. The distinctive features of research in the humanities are outlined and the role of acknowledgements as a source of contributorship information is reviewed to support these assumptions. Findings: Peer interactive communication is the prevailing support thanked in the acknowledgements of humanities, so the notion of acknowledgements as super-citations can make special sense in this area. Since single-authored papers still predominate as publishing pattern in this domain, the study of acknowledgements might help to understand social interactions and intellectual influences that lie behind a piece of research and are not visible through authorship. Originality/value: Previous works have proposed and explored the prevailing acknowledgement types by domain. This paper focuses on the humanities to show the role of acknowledgements within the reward system and highlight publication patterns and inherent research features which make acknowledgements particularly interesting in the area as reflection of the socio-cognitive structure of research.Comment: 14 page

Researcher-led teaching:embodiment of academic practice

This paper explores the embodied practices of leading researchers(and/or leading scholars/practitioners), suggesting that distinctive‘researcher-led teaching’ depends on educators who are willing and able to be their research in the teaching setting. We advocate an approach to the development of higher education pedagogy which makes lead-researchers the objects of inquiry and we summarise case study analyses (in neuroscience and humanities) where the knowledge-making‘signatures’ of academic leaders are used to exhibit the otherwise hidden identities of research. We distinguish between learning readymade knowledge and the process of knowledge in the making and point towards the importance of inquiry in the flesh. We develop a view of higher education teaching that depends upon academic status a priori, but we argue that this stance is inclusive because it has the propensity to locate students as participants in academic culture

Improving work processes by making the invisible visible

Increasingly, companies are taking part in process improvement programmes, which brings about a growing need for employees to interpret and act on data representations. We have carried out case studies in a range of companies to identify the existence and need of what we call Techno-mathematical Literacies (TmL): functional mathematical knowledge mediated by tools and grounded in the context of specific work situations. Based on data gathered from a large biscuit manufacturing and packaging company, we focus our analysis here on semiotic mediation within activity systems and identify two sets of related TmL: the first concerns rendering some invisible aspects visible through the production of mathematical signs; the second concerns developing meanings for action from an interpretation of these signs. We conclude with some more general observations concerning the role that mathematical signs play in the workplace. The nee

The role of the arts in professional education; making the invisible, visible.

'The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls' (Pablo Picasso). This paper will explore the value of using the arts in professional education. We use the term arts to include all the creative arts, such as poetry, drama, music, fiction, film, television and all the visual arts. The general argument in our paper could be applied to education for a wide range of professionals, although we draw on examples from health, teaching, business, and law. Professional education, and particularly professional education which confers a licence to practice, is often tightly regulated and controlled by professional bodies, and curricula are generally employer-led. Students invest heavily in their education in most countries in the world, with a few enlightened and beleaguered countries constituting exceptions. In England, fees in most universities have risen almost threefold for entry in 2012. Globally, students expect a financial return on their investment in the form of a graduate job. Policy spanning decades and cutting across political parties has emphasised the production of employable graduates as the primary role of higher education. Our contention is that this has led to a significant narrowing of the focus of professional education. There is a difference, however, between creating a 'job-ready' graduate, who is able to fulfil a narrow set of immediate vocational requirements, and developing a creative critical thinker, who is able not merely to implement current best practice, but to challenge it, develop it and even overturn it if necessary and who will be able to function at the highest level if circumstances change and new challenges present themselves. Sheridan-Rabideau (2010, p. 56) argues that “there is both room and need for preparing more creative individuals in every discipline”. The paper offers a rationale for widening the curriculum so that it includes opportunities for imaginative and open ended work, via engagement with the arts. It draws on research projects that each of us has conducted and some under development. We will also draw on both theoretical literature and on literature offering examples of good practice in this area. We aim to show how the arts enable people to expand their thinking and feeling so that they can get to those things that are often invisible because they are difficult to express in conventional academic language. We will explore, for example, how the arts may stimulate playful approaches that can bypass inhibition and produce surprising and exceptional ideas, how they encourage the envisioning of alternatives , helping us to overturn thinking trammelled by routine, how they may promote empathy and a deeper understanding of those whom professionals try to help and support and how they might help professionals develop a resistance to hegemonic perspectives. Our argument is that professionals have to be able to get 'beyond the dust of daily life', rise above routines and protocols and think imaginatively and creatively

Women, know your limits: Cultural sexism in academia

Despite the considerable advances of the feminist movement across Western societies, in Universities women are less likely to be promoted, or paid as much as their male colleagues, or even get jobs in the first place. One way in which we can start to reflect on why this might be the case is through hearing the experiences of women academics themselves. Using feminist methodology, this article attempts to unpack and explore just some examples of ‘cultural sexism’ which characterise the working lives of many women in British academia.This article uses qualitative methods to describe and make sense of just some of those experiences. In so doing, the argument is also made that the activity of academia is profoundly gendered and this explicit acknowledgement may contribute to our understanding of the under-representation of women in senior positions

In/gratitude? Library acknowledgement in theses and dissertations at a distinguished African university

Giving credit to where it is due is common across cultures. In research, researchers widely express their gratitude to those who would have contributed to their studies in one way or the other under the acknowledgements section. In most cases, the selection of who to acknowledge remains the prerogative of the author. The purpose of this study was to review acknowledgements in Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) with a special focus on the acknowledgement accorded to the library and librarians at the North-West University in South Africa. This was done in order to determine the perceived value of librarians as partners in the research process by postgraduate students. The study followed a two pronged approach in which bibliometrics and survey research methods were used. In the case of the bibliometrics, ETDs completed between 2012 and 2018 were reviewed. Regarding the survey, both print and online questionnaires were used to gather data from postgraduate students. Excel spreadsheets and QuestionPro software were used to analyse the data. The study findings indicate that supervisors of research work topped the list of acknowledgees followed by family, friends and colleagues. The library/librarian acknowledgements, were among the least with only 15% of ETDs giving gratitude to the library/librarians. However, like in previous studies, it was observed that library/librarians were mentioned in other parts of the ETDs, apart from the acknowledgements section. The results further indicate that the majority of the surveyed participants, held acknowledgements in high esteem. The paper will go a long way in adding value to a body of existing literature which is largely from the developed world. It may also stimulate interest for related studies in other developing countries

The Sunglasses of Ideology: Augmented Reality as Posthuman Cognitive Prosthesis

This project argues a methodological approach for examining augmented reality (AR) that blends new media studies with that of the digital humanities to develop a hybrid methodology that accounts for AR as a digital medium and, in turn, a critical framework for digital humanities (DH) cultural criticism. As Steven Jones argues in The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, the digital has always been physical, and the network has become the water in which we swim (20). Our networked tech has begun to reflect this by showing closer interaction between physical and digital artifacts, the most notable example being AR, where digital information responds directly to physical space. This project takes a multidisciplinary approach to explore the rhetorical and ideological implications of AR as both a technology and a medium. By exploring AR as it relates to current digital humanities scholarship, comparative new media studies, and critical theory, as well as a hands-on approach that involved the development of an AR smartphone application, this project aims to show that augmented reality is uniquely useful as a vessel for future research into digital materiality, while eventually arguing that this tech literalizes imaginative and cognitive processes, ultimately revealing a posthuman ontology where thinking and technology are indistinguishable from one another

The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments

Despite an increase in the number of PhDs earned by women and faculty of color in recent decades, they are less numerous among faculty at US colleges and universities. This scarcity is most pronounced at the level of full professor. Why are women and faculty of color not reaching the upper levels of academia? Previous research in the cultural taxation literature suggests that women and faculty of color experience heavier service burdens than their white male colleagues. In order to examine whether a heavier service burden could be at the root of the “leaky pipeline” from PhD to full professor among women and faculty of color, we recruited faculty in five departments at a large research university to record their daily tasks in time-use journals during two different weeks in a 10-week quarter. Our analysis of these journals provided mixed results with regard to gender, but pointed to important differences with regard to other axes of inequality. Specifically, we found that faculty of color, queer faculty, and faculty from working class backgrounds together spent a disproportionate amount of their time on the “invisible” work of academia, leaving them less time for the work that matters for tenure and promotion