Big Data and New Metrics of Scholarly Expertise

The 2013 National Communication Association convention included a deliberative double-session on big data, featuring Professor Lawrence Martin, co-founder of one of the leading business intelligence firms serving institutions of higher education, Academic Analytics. Analyzing the program transcript...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe review of communication Vol. 14; no. 3-4; pp. 288 - 313
Main Authors Hartelius, E. Johanna, Mitchell, Gordon R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 02.10.2014
Subjects
Academic Analytics
Bibliometrics
Citation Count
Expertise
Fallacy
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Summary:The 2013 National Communication Association convention included a deliberative double-session on big data, featuring Professor Lawrence Martin, co-founder of one of the leading business intelligence firms serving institutions of higher education, Academic Analytics. Analyzing the program transcript and deliberative polling results of audience feedback, this article explores how the development and use of new scholarly metrics implicate professional knowledge production in communication, and conversely, how conceptual tools from the rhetorical tradition elucidate the surge of digital scholarship that promises to reshape the intellectual landscape. The essay's middle sections isolate in discourse by and about Academic Analytics three "congruities of expertise"-techne, rhetorical exigence, and audience deference-and three topoi of assessment expertise, identified in the analysis as deference, humanizing metric, and negative synecdoche. The article then reviews an ongoing effort to curate a Wikipedia catalog of "measurement fallacies," designed to supply inventive resources for scholars engaged in practical dialogues in which big data and new metrics are deployed to assess scholarly expertise.
ISSN:1535-8593
1535-8593
DOI:10.1080/15358593.2014.979432