The Humanities Assessment Hub: Building Tools for Supporting Excellence and Equity in Scholarship

Workshop Presentation
Emily Schmitt,  Deirdre de la Cruz  

Among the most compelling new directions in humanities scholarship in the last 20 years are an increased emphasis on collaborative research, more sophisticated community engagement, and an expanded range of forms of dissemination. Drawing on significant experience over the last several decades at the University of Michigan and building on Ellison and Eatman’s “Scholarship in Public,” the Humanities Collaboratory has developed an archive to aid evaluators and evaluatees in performing serious and rigorous assessment of these emerging forms of scholarship. At the 2024 New Directions conference in Rome we presented a workshop titled "Translating Value: Experiments in Assessment for New Forms of Humanities Research.” The gathered workshop participants offered excellent feedback and valuable conversation. The website we have created as a culmination of our work on this subject will launch early in 2025 and we would like the opportunity to present a follow-up workshop to share our advancements. This workshop invites participants to think with us about how this website can be better informed by incorporating participants' multicultural perspectives as humanities scholars and practitioners. In other words, we want to share our work developing resources and engage with workshop participants to learn from them about their practices and the challenges they face. We will ask them big questions about how they frame their thinking about knowledge production, about peer review, about meaningfully honing their critical skills, and about how scholars articulate the value in the humanities in the academy – all in the service of moving the conversation forward.