Academic outputs

At about the same time that academia was force-marched into accountability, the writing that academics do came to be referred to as outputs, as if in some sort of quasi-mechanical fashion scholars were being paid to sit on a production line watching ideas, data, themes or perhaps chunks of half-formed text rolling down a conveyor belt to be riveted together into papers, journal articles or monographs. According to this new industrial logic the productivity or worth of an academic would depend on the availability of high quality material published by a reputable publisher in a prestigious journal. Academic writing would then be on the market, favoured or favourited, liked, bought or somehow consumed by others. Just as the ways in which we think about publishing has had to take account of digital distribution and open access, academic activity, and writing in particular, has been reshaped by new market forces. Much has been written about this, and there's still plenty to debate, but the hidden cost lies in the reshaping of academic labour into something that appears to be measurable, even quantifiable in some way. A single output certainly could be described in terms of its weight as a printout, its word count or average word length - and people would be right to scoff if these were proposed as measures of its importance. So perhaps the number of citations an output receives seems more scientific - but then, if we think that influence or popularity is the same thing as quality we'd be fooling ourselves. Such measures are at the most a very rough guide, as is the h-index of an individual academic, dependent as it is on the cumulative market value of citations. Could we ever achieve consensus on the quality of academic writing? Perhaps in very broad terms we might agree that some outputs are more persuasive than others, that some develop a robust argument, develop or introduce a new perspective or contribute to the advance of knowledge. But as with writing in general, perceptions of quality are, in the end, an individual and even a temporary judgement, partly because of the way in which our own reading reflects shifting interests and purposes. For me it has frequently been the case that what I've read, and perhaps cited, may not be particularly well argued or well founded, but something that has caused me to stop and reflect - just as going to a presentation that annoys me can help to clarify my own thinking. Even academic writing that has had a formative influence may not be recognised as significant till later on, until its ideas have been absorbed, debated and reinterpreted. After all, even Einstein's groundbreaking work failed to make an immediate impact. Steady and considered assessment and re-assessment is how knowledge evolves, how ideas build within and across academic communities. As we know, a piece of writing - an output, if you must - is always in dialogue with other writing, with other discussions, and with a range of practices and perspectives. At the end of Middlemarch, George Elliot claims that the 'growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' and owed to those 'who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs'. The accumulation of knowledge and the evaluation of the work of academics in general seems to me to require the same sort of logic - a recognition of a community of practitioners many of whom may live a hidden life, rather than an assembly line of outputs judged by their market value and the prestige of the individuals who produce them.

Reading with the algorithm

Georgi Gospodinov has an enviable light touch as a writer. Reading his novel Time Shelter I was delighted by his description of temporary havens from years gone by - havens initially designed as a comfort for those suffering from dementia. In Gospodinov's fictional world the idea becomes so popular and so contagious that it extends to whole cities and then eventually whole countries. Under referendum-like conditions, citizens then vote to remain or return to earlier times. It's an engaging and thought-provoking political satire. But it also encourages deeper reflection on personal and cultural memory, on identity and the meanings of nationality. After I'd put Time Shelter down almost straight away I picked up Sanak Hiiragi's Lantern of Lost Memories, which is a very different sort of book, a different kind of writing, but equally engaging in its own way. The coincidence of choosing two novels that explored the theme of time and memory struck me as odd, despite the fact that it's a common literary trope. Of course you could develop a whole reading list on that theme - one that for me would have to include Proust, Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, and Yoko Agawa's charming novella The Housekeeper and the Professor. It's not surprising that time and the novel is a well-worn theme, and scholarship still looks back to Bakhtin's essays on the subject for inspiration. Yet despite knowing that this is a recurrent trope, it surprised me to read two such well-matched books. It was only later when I remembered that I'd looked for Time Shelter on Amazon, shortly after reading a review of it in the London Review of Books. It was the Amazon algorithm that had recommended the Hiiragi book to me. Thank you Amazon, but it pulled me up short. I'm continually realising that I don't enjoy as much agency as I think I do. I'm under the influence. Of course there's upbringing and education. In fact there's all those forces that formed me as a reader, and a particular kind of reader at that. I'm influenced by all sorts of social, cultural and political forces that manifest in all sorts of ways (taking out a subscription to the London Review of Books is just one small example of this). I'm influenced to follow up on Gospodinov, and then I'm influenced by the algorithm! All in all I'm caught up in, influenced or even produced by, a condensation of heterogeneous forces, algorithms included. We know how algorithms influence us, how they nudge us in different directions, influence what we think is important - what we buy, where we go and how we get there as well as what we watch and what we read. I used to argue strongly for the importance of having a community of readers - peers, colleagues, friends and family - in fact all of the wider social network is worth considering. And these are still so important, but there are wider forces at play, too. Now technologies are beginning to play an important role as well. Perhaps non-human factors have always been there, but the development of algorithms and AI signals an enhanced technological participation in how we experience the world. I read with the algorithm.