‘21 Grams’: Interdisciplinarity and the Assessment of Quality in the Humanities

Abstract

In their joint contribution, the president of the German Association for English Studies (Deutscher Anglistenverband), Klaus Stierstorfer, and the president of the German Association for American Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien), Peter Schneck, describe the central motivations behind the decision to actively support the pilot study for the research rating of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) despite some fundamental skepticism among the associations's members. On the basis of five basic propositions-different in each argument-they both insist that the assessment of research quality in the humanities inevitably requires the central involvement of the disciplines assessed in order to reflect on and formulate the central categories, standards and procedures best suited for such assessments. Such a process must take into account the complexity of research processes and results in the humanities whose qualitative dimensions cannot be fully measured by quantitative methods. Rating Research: Who Needs It, and What Is It Good For? (by Klaus Stiersdorfer)Research rating and ranking is happening now, at least in German academia in my experience, and it has been growing in the anglophone countries, with which I deal professionally, at an alarming pace and as a kind of menetekel for whatever other countries may be planning to do in the future. This is why, and here is my first thesis, research rating and ranking cannot be avoided at present. If my first thesis is accepted, then it is worth exploring what it looks like at present in the humanities.

The future of research assessment in the humanities: bottom-up assessment procedures

“…The projects presented in this article show furthermore that if the assessment procedures adequately reflect the SSH research practices, scholars are ready to collaborate (for example, Giménez-Toledo et al, 2013;Ochsner et al, 2014) and to accept more easily research assessment, like in the Norwegian or German case (Aagaard et al, 2015;Sivertsen, 2016;Stierstorfer and Schneck, 2016). Full-coverage databases including all relevant document types are of value for scholarly work (Gogolin, 2016;Sandor and Vorndran, 2014a, b) and increase the visibility of humanities research production (Aagaard et al, 2015).…”

“…In 2012, a pilot study in the humanities was eventually conducted. While still against the notion of quantifying research performance, the associations of English and American Studies decided to take part in the exercise (Stierstorfer and Schneck, 2016). The Wissenschaftsrat qualified the exercise as a success that showed that such a rating is possible in the humanities; the humanities scholars involved in the exercise acknowledged the effort by the Wissenschaftsrat to adapt the procedure to the humanities but also identified some negative aspects and consequences of the exercise, such as a division into different sub-disciplines instead of a focus on commonalities (Hornung et al, 2016).…”