Since 1986, the British government, faced with dwindling budgets and growing calls for public accountability, has sought to assess the value of scholarly work in the nation’s universities. Administrators have periodically evaluated the research of most full-time academics employed in British universities, seeking to distribute increasingly scarce funding to those who use it best. How do such attempts to quantify the worth of knowledge change the nature of scholarship? Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra examines the effects of quantitative research evaluations on British social scientists, arguing that the mission to measure academic excellence resulted in less diversity and more disciplinary conformity. Combining interviews and original computational analyses, The Quantified Scholar provides a compelling account of how scores, metrics, and standardized research evaluations altered the incentives of scientists and administrators by rewarding forms of scholarship that were closer to established disciplinary canons. In doing so, research evaluations amplified publication hierarchies and long-standing forms of academic prestige to the detriment of diversity. Slowly but surely, they reshaped academic departments, the interests of scholars, the organization of disciplines, and the employment conditions of researchers. Critiquing the effects of quantification on the workplace, this book also presents alternatives to existing forms of evaluation, calling for new forms of vocational solidarity that can challenge entrenched inequality in academia.

This book explains the complete loop to effectively use self-tracking data for machine learning. While it focuses on self-tracking data, the techniques explained are also applicable to sensory data in general, making it useful for a wider audience. Discussing concepts drawn from from state-of-the-art scientific literature, it illustrates the approaches using a case study of a rich self-tracking data set. Self-tracking has become part of the modern lifestyle, and the amount of data generated by these devices is so overwhelming that it is difficult to obtain useful insights from it. Luckily, in the domain of artificial intelligence there are techniques that can help out: machine-learning approaches allow this type of data to be analyzed. While there are ample books that explain machine-learning techniques, self-tracking data comes with its own difficulties that require dedicated techniques such as learning over time and across users.

After a remarkable career in higher education, Sidonie Smith offers Manifesto for the Humanities as a reflective contribution to the current academic conversation over the place of the Humanities in the 21st century. Her focus is on doctoral education and opportunities she sees for its reform. Grounding this manifesto in background factors contributing to current “crises” in the humanities, Smith advocates for a 21st century doctoral education responsive to the changing ecology of humanistic scholarship and teaching. She elaborates a more expansive conceptualization of coursework and dissertation, a more robust, engaged public humanities, and a more diverse, collaborative, and networked sociality.

Written by an impressive group of international scholars, this collection's ten essays explore key issues and forms of design, from ancient life ideals to the new media, displaying how creative design always revolves around the soma, the living, sentient body.

This book includes selecting the articles accepted for presentation and discussion at WCQR2023, held from January 25 to 27, 2023 (face to face and virtual conference). The World Conference on Qualitative Research (WCQR) is an annual event that aims to bring together researchers, academics and professionals, promoting the sharing and discussing knowledge, new perspectives, experiences and innovations in qualitative research. WCQR2023 featured four main application fields (education, health, social sciences and engineering/technology) and seven main subjects: rationale and paradigms of qualitative research; systematization of approaches with qualitative studies; qualitative and mixed methods research; data analysis types; innovative processes of qualitative data analysis; qualitative research in web context; and qualitative analysis with software support. The book is valuable for everyone interested in qualitative research, emphasizing Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS).

Qualitative Inquiry in Transition—Pasts, Presents, & Futures: A Critical Reader gathers more than 30 internationally renowned scholars in qualitative inquiry to present provocative interventions into the politics of research, philosophy of inquiry, justice matters, and writing practices. Drawn from a decade of cutting-edge plenary volumes emanating from the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, these contributors and their chapters represent the leading edge of scholarship that has pushed the field forward over the last decade. Topics discussed include the research marketplace, data entanglements, the neoliberal university, Indigenous methodologies, slow research, performative ethics, intersectionality, civically engaged research, post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialisms, collaborative research, poetic inquiry, academic writing, and the future of the field. These and other topics comprise a moving—rather than static—center to the field, one that moves across contexts and ontologies, moves between agreement and disagreement, forges new collaborations, and informs new inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to research. Qualitative Inquiry in Transition—Pasts, Presents, & Futures: A Critical Reader will be required reading for those seeking to understand where the field of qualitative inquiry has been and will look to go in the years to come.