Making the Humanities Count
The sciences have long benefited from the availability
of comprehensive, up-to-date data that describe the condition of their
disciplines — as provided, for example, by the Science and Engineering
Indicators, published biennially by the National Science Board.
Because no comparable database exists for the humanities, there are great gaps
in our knowledge of basic trends in those disciplines.
Soon after the Academy launched the Initiative for
Humanities and Culture, it appointed a Task Force on Data Development, chaired
by Jonathon Cole (Columbia University), Steven Marcus (Columbia University),
and Francis C. Oakley (Williams College). The Task Force commissioned a report
that evaluated existing humanities data and assessed the data’s usefulness for
answering the kinds of questions routinely addressed by the Science and
Engineering Indicators.
The report, titled The Evaluation of Existing Databases
for Policy Research on Humanities Fields, revealed the strengths and
weaknesses of current resources. The study made clear that existing humanities
data sources allow limited use for policy research because they lack uniformity
in their measurement techniques, analytic methods, and reporting standards. As
a result, advocates for the humanities cannot answer with precision a number of
fundamental questions about, for example, enrollment trends in graduate
education, the long-term employment of individuals with advanced degrees in
specific humanities fields, and the number of individuals with degrees in the
humanities who work outside their specialization.
The Academy and collaborating organizations responded
to this felt need for more and better data by instituting the
Humanities Indicators project. The Task Force invited four
individuals familiar with the issues to write essays explaining why the
Humanities Indicators are needed: Francis C. Oakley, former president of
Williams College; Robert Solow, Nobel Prize winner and professor emeritus in
economics at MIT; Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the Modern Language
Association; and John D’Arms, president of the American Council of Learned
Societies. The Academy published these essays, along with the initial report on
existing data in the humanities, in an Academy Occasional Paper,
Making the Humanities Count: The Importance of Data.
Funding for this project and publication was provided
by Walter B. Hewlett, the William R. Hewlett Trust, the Sara Lee Corporation,
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
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