Greetings from Chicago and the Museum Computer Network Conference

I'm here in Chicago for a very brief trip on a panel about metrics and measurement for museums called "New Spaces, New Measures."   My slides and resources are here.

I came across two more excellent resources on this evolving topic of social media metrics and wanted to quickly summarize before I add to the link list in the wiki.

The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority by Michael Jensen published in the Chronicle in June, 2007 describes how scholarly authority is being influenced by Web 2.0.   He points out, "While those trends are enabled by digital technology, I'm not concerned with technology per se — I learned years ago that technology doesn't drive change as much as our cultural response to technology does."   He talks about the cultural shift from information scarcity to abundance.  He suggests this list of metrics:

• Prestige of the publisher (if any).
• Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
• Prestige of commenters and other participants.
• Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
• Raw links to the document.
• Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
• Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
• Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
• Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status?
• Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
• Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s).
• Significance of author's other work.
• Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
• Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
• Length of time a document has existed.
• Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
• Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

He also notes that change will be slow:

Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument. Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

Via RSA Networks blog

Kami Hulse, who gave a small taste of her presentation on relational objectives has shared her presentation notes and slides on a post with the title "Let's Talk About The Bottom Line and Dreaded ROI"  I used a similar title in the presentation I gave at Podcamp last week called "Let's Talk About Social Media Metrics, Measurement, and ROI."  Geoff Livingston has started a conversation meme here.
Be sure to check out Kami's links on measurement.

 

 

Comments

[Kami Huyse]

Thanks Beth, always glad to find someone else interested in measurement and being effective.

[Geoff Livingston]

Thanks, Beth. Looking forward to a great discussion on this very important topic.

[Beth Kanter]

Best quote from the session was "No one told me that the page view was dead!"