Game Fiction

“Game Fiction” provides a framework for understanding the relationship between narrative and computer games and is defined as a genre of game that draws upon and uses narrative strategies to create, maintain, and lead a user through a fictional environment. Competitive, ergodic, progressive (and often episodic), game fictions’ primary goal must include the actualization of predetermined events. Building on existing game and new media scholarship and drawing from theories of narrative, cinema, and literature, my project details the formal materiality that undergirds game fiction and shapes its themes. In doing so, I challenge the critiques of narrativism levied at those scholars who see a relationship between computer games and narrative forms, while also detailing the ways that computational media alter and reform narratological preconceptions. My study proposes a methodology for discussing game fiction through a series of ‘close playings,’ and while not intended to be chronological or comprehensive, provides a model for understanding narrative and genre in this growing field

HuMetricsHSS: towards value-based indicators in the Humanities and Social Sciences

This presentation will introduce the HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences) initiative, which aims to develop and support a values-based framework of indicators for excellence for the humanities and social science in academia and, by extension, academic libraries. This value-based evaluation paradigm uses metrics only to measure a scholar’s progress toward embodying five values that our initial research suggests are central to all HSS disciplines: Collegiality, Quality, Equity, Openness, Community. HuMetricsHSS is an underway endeavor by a team of scholars and information professionals working to find ways to expose, highlight, and recognize the important scholarship that goes into not only research activities, but also the all-too-hidden work of peer review, teaching, service, and mentoring. The framework will support scholars in telling a more textured and compelling story about the impact of their research and scholarship and the variety of ways it enriches the academic and public life. While the endeavor started as a North American initiative, our purpose is to engage the broadest audience possible in the process, and European academics and research libraries would be natural and important stakeholders from which we wish to have input and feedback from

Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy

Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy is the culmination of 18 months of research interviews across the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). Conducted by the HuMetricsHSS Initiative as an extension of their previous work on values-enacted scholarly practice, the interviews focused on current systems of evaluation within BTAA institutions, the potential problems and inequalities of those processes, the kinds of scholarly work that could be better recognized and rewarded, and the contexts and pressures evaluators are under, including, as the process progressed, the onset and ongoing conditions of COVID-19. The interviews focused primarily on the reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process. Interviewees outlined a number of issues to be addressed, including toxicity in evaluation, scholars’ increased alienation from the work they are passionate about, and a high-level virtue-signaling of values by institutions without the infrastructure or resources to support the enactment of those values. Based on these conversations, this white paper offers a set of recommendations for making wide-scale change to address systematic injustice, erasure, and devaluation of academic labor in order to strengthen the positive public impact of scholarship

Exploring values-based (alt)metrics to enhance library services

This paper describes the HuMetricsHSS initiative, which calls for a major shift towards a values-based evaluation paradigm in academia and, by extension, academic libraries. HuMetricsHSS proposes that metrics only be used to measure a one’s progress towards embodying five core values that initial research suggests are central to all humanities and social science disciplines: Collegiality, Quality, Equity, Openness, and Community. This paper explores these values and their potential application to academic library services. How might “equity” be embodied in the context of collection management? Should “openness” be a prerequisite for supporting journals? Might new conceptions of “quality” better guide our services offered to faculty and students? Both traditional metrics (i.e., bibliometrics) and altmetrics’ applicability for these purposes are explored

Humanities Values Infographic

This infographic represents an in-progress attempt by the #Humetrics team at TriangleSCI to pin down values that, if encouraged and incentivized in the academy, would enrich and improve humanities scholarship. It is meant to start a conversation. What are we missing? See more about the process and thinking behind this approach at https://medium.com/tag/humetrics

The transformative power of values-enacted scholarship

First published online: 07 December 2020The current mechanisms by which scholars and their work are evaluated across higher education are unsustainable and, we argue, increasingly corrosive. Relying on a limited set of proxy measures, current systems of evaluation fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies. Drawing on the work of the HuMetricsHSS Initiative, this essay argues that by aligning values with practices, recognizing the vital processes that enrich the work produced, and grounding our indicators of quality in the degree to which we in the academy live up to the values for which we advocate, a values-enacted approach to research production and evaluation has the capacity to reshape the culture of higher education

HuMetricsHSS Code of Conduct

HuMetricsHSS strives to cultivate an academy that’s inclusive, open, collaborative, collegial, and generous. A scholarly life well-lived does not allow harassment in any form. This code of conduct governs the environment of our meetings, workshops, interactions, and communications, and exists to remind us of our values as we interact with others

Walking the Talk APPENDIX H: Appointment, Reappointment, Tenure, and Promotion Recommendations

Appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion recommendations in use at Michigan State University for the white paper Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy. Full paper: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:44631/

Walking the Talk APPENDIX C: Faculty Reporting Systems

A list of the faculty reporting systems in use by the Big Ten Academic Alliance member institutions for the white paper Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy. Full paper: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:44631/