Thank you all for an engaging and provocative discussion. This will be a short summary of the major points. Comments are open to all comers.
A Summary:
Bob and Karine gave quick five minute introductions each.
Bob asked how you measure success in information schools. He suggested that impact was one important measure. Bob also present an initial list of stakeholders to the iSchool. Each stakeholder was listed with a way they measured the school.
Karine emphasized the importance of boundaries to help define an iSchool community. For example, it is the emphasis on information that defines us. She also recognized the developing nature of the iSchool and discussed pros and cons of firm boundaries in such a case.
These two introductions opened the room to a number of discussions. I saw two major questions:
(Q1) What is an iSchool (or our iSchool)?
(Q2) What are metrics of our school? What should they be?
Here are some answers from the room:
To (Q1) on identity:
- Information is a vague term and must be connected to People and Technology.
- The future shape of the school is still being defined. Chosen ethics or politics may help define the school.
- We should caution against becoming so undefined and amorphous lest the school itself disappear. This is a trap. (Reference other departments that were so interdisciplinary that they lost definition and disappeared).
- We have a hard time articulating who we are.
- We need a common purpose. With a common purpose, these questions of metrics will align themselves.
- We should have a set of “problem spaces”.
This is a good, non-contentious way of defining ourselves.
This will help define”Information – People – Technology”.
This will help communicate with external stakeholders.
- We do not want a school separated into knowledge silos.
- The nature of our community (welcoming, etc… ) is important to our definition as an iSchool.
- Our interdisciplinarity is important to our definition as an iSchool.
T o (Q2) on metrics:
- There is a difference between external metrics (i.e. how outside stakeholders see us) and internal metrics. External metrics allow us to communicate to the University, prospective students, etc…
- The school’s developing nature make it difficult to define metrics. Conversely, a metric may constrain the development of the school.
- The school’s interdisciplinary nature makes it difficult to produce one metric. The number of publications or the kinds of systems produced by one faculty member does not translate as a metric for another faculty member.
- The school’s internal metrics, such as the tenure process, are healthy. For example, the tenure process does take into account the impact that faculty has had on the surrounding local community or local businesses.
- Proposed measurements, based on our interdisciplinary nature:
- How many of our projects link with other departments? or have multiple investigators from different disciplines?
- How central is the iSchool to networks? How far would we go to have influence on policy? How connected are we to major decisions. This metric uses a network approach.
- What are our hiring patterns?
- Are our faculty able to communicate?
- How diverse are our doctoral committees
- In response to these measurements, a comment was raised: well, these metrics don’t fit with faculty in our school who do research alone and who don’t collaborate.
- We need a portfolio of metrics, not one general set for the school.
October 9, 2006 at 6:44 pm |
One of the things that I wonder about–thinking as a historian, which is not my training–is how other disciplines have dealt with developing/shifting boundaries in their formative years. Perhaps the most appropriate example would be from communications, but others might have some “lessons learned” that would be relevant for our discussions re: information science.
That said, I do not think we are alone in raising these concerns. Women studies departments come under attack all the time (e.g., in David Horowitz’s book–and blog–The Professors: [The 101] Most Dangerous Academics in America) for not being scholarly and, in Horowitz’s comments from a March 26, 2006 segment from BookTV for not studying “women”. In listening to these critiques, I cannot help but think that information science is stuck with the same problems that other interdisciplinary fields such as women studies have: a focus on “everything” in society.
I almost believe that our emphasis should not be on what we study but should instead be placed on the questions we address or the problems that interest us as a field.
October 10, 2006 at 2:36 am |
I thought it may be fun to try a define the school by what might be said by people in each of what I see the big three in this field. Being new to Informatics I could use your help.
Computer Scientist
I gave you the perfect code and system why are the people and process mucking it up?
Systems Analyst (MIS)
I gave you the perfect process, I need the technology to support it and the people to use it.
Informatics
People use information like this, why doesn’t the technology or process support it?
October 10, 2006 at 4:18 pm |
In my opinion, these “big three” aren’t my “big three”; there are many more entries on my list of disciplines, occupations, and professions that ground our field. I don’t know if contributing this makes me an old-timer in information science, but it might be more valuable to think of the field in terms of our origins (although not as far back, perhaps, as some of Marcia Bates’ bibliography entries) and the gradual inclusion of a user-centered perspectives (and theories, and methods) as a complement to the “traditional” system-centric focus:
This shift is where my personal timeline of information science starts, and these perspectives still appear relevant as markers of boundaries in today’s research and practice in this field.
October 10, 2006 at 4:38 pm |
Here are the issues and questions this discussion raised for me:
It is imperative that we capture/articulate the problem spaces of the iSchool research community, beyond the notion of areas or disciplines and towards a rendering of true interdisciplinary engagement.
What is the “sponsored research funding” metric attempting to capture? Value to the free market? Or is it more complicated?
Given that we are an interdisciplinary unit with a range of competing metrics we can use to assess our value and impact, how do we as a School want to be measured and if so, how are we working to alter traditional metrics beyond UW?
There are UW units that are doing an exemplary job of using alternative metrics to assess their performance, an example would be the way in which UW Anthropology maps their faculty and student community service projects.
October 19, 2006 at 3:50 pm |
A follow up from the iConference (Ann Arbor) panel on Oct. 16:
Because a lot of the discussion at our meeting ended up focused on metrics, we changed our approach when we did the panel in Ann Arbor. Karine provided a summary/overview and noted (without enumerating them) that we have many stakeholders who will define us if we do not take the lead. She emphasized the need for community with porous boundaries, defined by the degree to which information is emphasized. I (and others) suggested we should emphasize information ethics as part of our iSchool identity. In my statement, I put less emphasis on metrics but noted that we needed them to communicate with our different stakeholder groups. I also summarized a couple of the metrics (mentioned in our own discussion)–centrality to a network, and the number of degrees of separation from the decision and policy makers.
Other panels made other suggestions about ways to increase our impact. John King suggested that we needed to include economists within our Jose-Marie Griffith (UNC-CH) observed that we would increase our capabilities by linking together, forming networks to do research. The latter is a suggestion we discussed later, and we may explore problem areas that offer good opportunities.
October 20, 2006 at 10:56 pm |
I’m glad to hear that things went well in A2! The panel sounds as though it touched on complimentary topics: communication, impact, and collaboration. So where does the discussion go from here?
October 27, 2006 at 6:51 pm |
Time to break out the dry-erase markers and start writing out problem spaces…no?
(BTW, what is a “problem space”? a domain, such as: communicative problems of distributed families or the role of the teacher-librarian in a small schools environment ??)
October 29, 2006 at 7:20 am |
Agreed.
(From my perspective.) I condsider “problem space” as all of the areas that a discipline has been investigating and/or that a set of research agendas might center around (e.g., what do we do about information overload?).