Creative activity can become invisible in systems optimized for conventional academic outputs.
15 responses. Almost exclusively R1 institutions. Average institution size approximately 40,000 students. Respondents include professors, deans, associate deans, chairs/heads, and academic professionals.
Evidence
Preliminary survey responses describe performances, exhibitions, applied work, and other forms of creative activity as difficult or impossible to represent in some institutional analytics systems. Arts outputs can become invisible when systems emphasize books, citations, awards, and conventional scholarly markers.
Interpretation
The Working Group treats this as a problem of representation. A missing category is not, by itself, evidence that the work lacks scholarly value.
Limitations
Preliminary. The sample is small and concentrated in large research universities. These descriptions are not universal facts about every platform or campus.
Related questions
- How can research universities represent the pathways, milestones, collaborations, and forms of impact associated with creative and interdisciplinary scholarship without reducing that work to conventional publication-equivalency metrics?
- What kinds of creative and interdisciplinary work disappear in current faculty activity systems?