Big Data and New Metrics of Scholarly Expertise

• Published in: The review of communication Vol. 14; no. 3-4; pp. 288 - 313
• Main Authors: Hartelius, E. Johanna, Mitchell, Gordon R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 02.10.2014
• Subjects: Academic Analytics; Bibliometrics; Citation Count; Expertise; Fallacy
• DOI: 10.1080/15358593.2014.979432
• ISSN: 1535-8593

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.