Editors’ Choice: One Finch, Two Finch, Red Finch, Blue Finch – Measuring Concentration and Diversity in the Humanities, A Response to Wellmon and Piper

In “Publication, Power, and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing,” Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper motivate their study in a laudable spirit: they seek to expose and root out elitism in the name of a more egalitarian and truly meritocratic academy.[1] That the study at the same time makes a claim for more studies of its kind— “What we need in our view is not less quantification but more” (“P”)—seems justifiable based on the results it found. We find, then, an argument for the continued practice of the digital humanities (DH).

But this study is not DH as we typically understand the term. Wellmon and Piper are not producing new software or a digital archive, or offering an interpretation of a large corpus of books using quantitative methods. Rather, they are humanists making a claim about social organization, where the organization in question is their own field. This is an important distinction to make. Rather than holding their study to a research standard held by other digital humanists, we ought instead to evaluate their work using the rubrics of disciplines that answer similar kinds of questions.

Specifically, Wellmon and Piper assess the heterogeneity of university representation in top humanities journals as an indicator of the extent to which publication practices in the humanities are corrupted by “patterns and practices of patronage and patrimony and the tight circulation of cultural capital” (“P”). Perhaps unknowingly, the authors find themselves a part of a long and contentious literature in the social sciences[2] and natural sciences[3] over the creation and interpretation of metrics for diversity (and its opposite, concentration) that continues through the current decade.[4] The authors put themselves into the shoes of ecologists seeking novel data in unexplored terrain. Traditional bibliometric indicators of status and concentration in the sciences that rely on citation and coauthorship lose traction in the humanities.[5] As such, the authors seek to do what any good ecologist might: they go out into the field and count species.

 

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