In the last year, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied by why we shouldn’t take social media metrics too seriously. In part, this preoccupation is analytical because following this thread has proven to be a useful way to move from my past focus on individual users of social media to a more […]
How significant can a tweet can be? We can point to isolated cases of individual tweets going viral, creating controversy and producing material outcomes in the world. But isolated tweets rarely have such significance. Instead, we need to look at a Twitter feed as a unit of analysis, taking someone’s entire […]
In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, there’s an interesting remark about the structural position of first time authors which I think has wider purchase. From pg 200: Ironically, in a world preoccupied by numbers, the author with no track is in some ways in a strong position, considerably stronger than […]
In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he describes what might be termed the bounded autonomy enjoyed by some editorial teams within publishing houses. From pg 128: the devolution of editorial decision-making to small editorial teams operating with a high degree of autonomy within certain financial parameters is the best way […]
In our discussion of metrics systems, it’s easy to treat subjectivity as a cipher, regarding people as passively moulded by algorithms or blindly governed by the incentives that operate through the institutionalisation of the metrics. My objection to the former is not the claim that people are shaped by metrics, but rather the […]
From The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin, loc 566-580: Moreover, data constitute an economic resource, one that is a key component of the next phase of the knowledge economy, reshaping the mode of production to one that it is data-driven (see Chapter 7). Since the late 1980s, scholars such as […]
Good news! This week it was learnt that CWTS will play host to the second annual conference ‘The Accelerated Academy: Evaluation, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life’. Generously sponsored by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, the event will take place from 30th November to 2nd December 2016 […]
An interesting snippet in this Fast Company profile of BuzzFeed about their viral lift metric and how this trumps page views as a measure of success: Stopera, an Internet savant so steeped in pop culture that he appeared on an episode of MTV’s Fanography as a teenager for his “psychotic” love of Britney […]
Call for Papers A workshop on Competition(s) As part of a broader project – Performances of Value: Competition and Competitions Inside and Outside Markets – we call for papers for a workshop on Competition(s) that will take place on June 10-11, 2016 at the Copenhagen Business School. Costs for travel, […]
UC Davis, February 4-5, 2016 The event is open to the public. Please register here. Follow on Twitter at #GamingMetrics. This conference explores a recent evolution of scholarly misconduct connected to the increasing reliance of metrics in the evaluation of individual faculty, departments, and universities. Misconduct has traditionally been tied to the […]
A fascinating snippet from The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, describing the approach of a new operations director joining Facebook in 2007. From pg 144: The next week, Chamath asked me and my management colleagues in customer support to do an evaluation exercise in which we ranked everyone on the […]
From page 75 of Brad Stone’s excellent book The Everything Store: In early 1998, Bezos was closely involved with a department called Personalization and Community, which was geared toward helping customers discover books, music, and movies they might find interesting. That May, he surveyed what was then Amazon’s Hot 100 […]
When questioned by a friend in 1980 as to whether he was happy at Princeton, the philosopher Richard Rorty replied that he was “delighted that I lucked into a university which pays me to make up stories and tell them”. He went on to suggest that “Universities permit one to […]
Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life, 2nd-4th December 2015, Prague Call for papers: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life There is little doubt that science and knowledge production are presently undergoing dramatic and multi-layered transformations accompanied by new imperatives reflecting broader socio-economic and technological developments. The unprecedented proliferation […]
Having just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers, this exchange by text seems oddly sinister:
This article by John Holmwood is worth reading: There are few national systems of higher education that are immune from their effects, though their use is more extensive and systematic in some places, rather than others. They seem to have gone furthest in national systems with a high proportion of […]
Paul Kirby and Meera Sabaratnam have written a thought-provoking response to the HEFCE consultation on using metrics for research assessment. Archived here because I plan on coming back to this properly at a later date. This is their account of the motivations driving this turn towards metrics, which they go on […]
It feels a little wrong that it’s ranking above Simon Wren-Lewis on eBuzzing. The methodology is a little opaque and I’m wondering if the reason for this high ranking is my ‘proactive’ scheduling of the @soc_imagination twitter feed: Blog ranking based on the score calculated by Ebuzzing which considers various […]
