1. The presentation discusses the researcher as a "quantified self" and how performance metrics in higher education impact identity and self-worth. 2. It explores how researchers are increasingly measured through publications, citations, and other metrics, which has structural impacts and changes the rules of performing research. 3. The presentation examines the notion of self-tracking and being tracked by others, and considers both the potential and dangers of quantifying the self through digital data collection.

1. Paul Prinsloo, University of South Africa
Sharon Slade, Open UniversityImage credit: http://hominidas.blogs.quo.es/2013/11/; http://www.exponerat.net/socialdemokratins-bruna-bakgrund/;
http://webbplatser.nordiskamuseet.se/minaogon/sida/historia/hist2.htm
The researcher as quantified self:
Confessions & contestations
By Paul Prinsloo
Presentation at SOTL@UJ - Towards a Socially Just Pedagogy 14 May 2015

2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this
presentation. I hereby acknowledge the original
copyright and licensing regime of every image and
reference used. All the images used in this
presentation have been sourced from Google labeled
for non-commercial re-use.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

3. OVERVIEW OF THE PRESENTATION
1. Some questions for consideration
2. Becoming & being measured, deviant or hero
3. The higher education context: Broader context, the move
to digital & networked identities & the changing rules of
performing research
4. The notion & praxis of being & becoming a quantified self
5. Five modes of self-tracking (Lupton, 2014c)
6. The quantified (digital) self: some considerations
7. Deviants or heroes: The net effect of being quantified &
classified
8. (In)conclusions

4. Some questions to consider:
• How does the dominant auditing and managerialist culture in
higher education, and the current quantification fetish obsessed
with measuring outputs & performance, impact on my identity &
performance as researcher?
• What do we measure? Who does the measurement & why,
based on what criteria?
• What is not measured & how does this impact on my final score?
What am I worth? My sense of self?
• How do I (increasingly) track my own performance in an unending
obsession & anxiety about whether I do enough/am good
enough?
• How does all of this impact on my identity, my self-worth &
sense of wellbeing?
(See Prinsloo, 2014)

5. We are increasingly
watched/measured
We increasingly
watch/measure each
other
We increasingly watch
ourselves
Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance#/media/File:Surveillance_video_cameras,_Gdynia.jpeg

6. Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-interest
Every breath I/you take
Every move I/you make
Every bond I/you break
Every step I/you take
I'll be watching myself/you
Every single day
Every word I/you say
Every game I/you play
Every night I/you stay
I'll be watching myself/you
O can't I/you see
I/You belong to them/me…
Adapted from
Sting – Every breath you take

7. Becoming and being measured, deviant or hero
Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anthropometry

8. What type of sociocultural, political, economic &
regulatory context creates the notion & praxis of the researcher
as quantified self?
How are researchers as quantified selves structurally defined &
generated, maintained, culled or lauded? (see Spitzer, 1975)
The higher
education context
• The broader higher
education context
• The move to digital and
networked identities
• The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified self
The
researcher
as
quantified
self

9. Becoming and being measured, deviant or hero
What type of sociocultural, political, economic and regulatory context s
creates the notion of the researcher as quantified self?
How are researchers as quantified selves structurally defined & generated,
maintained, culled or lauded? (see Spitzer, 1975)
The higher
education context
1. The broader higher
education context
2. The move to digital and
networked identities
3. The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified self
The
researcher
as
quantified
self

10. Higher education should…
• Do more with less
• Expect funding to follow performance
rather than preceding it
• Realise it costs too much, spends carelessly, teaches poorly, plans
myopically, and when questioned, acts defensively
(Hartley, 1995, p. 412, 861)
We need to take note of the impact of the dominant models of
neoliberalism and its not-so-humble servant – managerialism – on
higher education (Deem, 1998; Deem & Brehony, 2005; Diefenbach,
2007; Peters, 2013; Verhaeghe, 2014)
The broader higher education context (1)
Image credit:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mcdonalds_logo.png

11. There is talk of “academic capitalism” (Rhoades & Slaughter, 2004)
where academics “sell their expertise to the highest bidder, research
collaboratively, and teaching on/off line, locally and internationally”
(Blackmore 2001, p. 353; emphasis added)
“The research universities will have three classes of professors, like the
airlines. A small first-class cabin of researchers, a business-class section
of academics who will teach and do some research, and a large economy
cabin of poorly paid teachers” (Altbach & Finkelstein, 2014, par. 16;
emphasis added)
“… the academic precariat has risen as a reserve army of workers with
ever shorter, lower paid, hyper-flexible contracts and ever more
temporally fragmented and geographically displaced hyper-mobile lives”
(Ivancheva, 2015, p. 39)
The broader higher education context (2)

12. In 2012, of the 1.5 million professors in the US, 1 million are
adjunct professors appointed on a contract basis (Scott, 2012)
Higher education is therefore in the process of becoming
unbundled and unmoored (Watters, 2012)
The broader higher education context (3)
Image credit: http://pixabay.com/p-485222/?no_redirect

13. Becoming and being measured, deviant or hero
What type of sociocultural, political, economic and regulatory context s
creates the notion of the researcher as quantified self?
How are researchers as quantified selves structurally defined & generated,
maintained, culled or lauded? (see Spitzer, 1975)
The higher
education context
1. The broader higher
education context
2. The move to digital and
networked identities
3. The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified self
The
researcher
as
quantified
self

14. The move to digital & networked
scholarly/researcher identities
• Porous/disappearing boundaries between
personal/professional/private/public
• Changing conventions of definition of
knowledge, ways of knowledge production,
dissemination, peer-review & measuring
impact
• Alternative metrics
• Inhabiting spaces/performing research
Image credit: http://www.philips.nl/e/nederland-blog/blog/de-marketingspecialist-moet-digitaal-zijn.html

15. Becoming and being measured, deviant or hero
What type of sociocultural, political, economic and regulatory context s
creates the notion of the researcher as quantified self?
How are researchers as quantified selves structurally defined & generated,
maintained, culled or lauded? (see Spitzer, 1975)
The higher
education context
1. The broader higher
education context
2. The move to digital and
networked identities
3. The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified self
The
researcher
as
quantified
self

16. Hartzing’s Publish or Perish

18. The (traditional) rules of performing research
Unisa’s Strategic Plan 2015 clearly states the intention: “To position Unisa
in the Top 5 universities in South Africa in terms of research outputs per
academic by 2015 (Placed 6th in 2004 in numerical outputs)” (Unisa, 2015,
p. 17).
Research criteria:
• Publish my own research whether as articles or chapters. To score a 3 out
of 5, I need to have published 7 individual articles in the last 3 years, or 10
individual articles in the last 5 years. If I co-authored the article with
another researcher – I only get half the points
• A further 15% weight is allocated if I submitted a grant application to an
external funding agency. To score 3 out of 5, my grant should have been
successful.
• 10% of the total weighting is allocated to being a rated researcher. A ‘C-
rating’ guarantees me a 3 out of 5.

19. But… the rules of performing research
are changing …
Image credit: http://blog-
blond.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

28. Becoming and being measured, deviant or hero
What type of sociocultural, political, economic and regulatory context s
creates the notion of the researcher as quantified self?
How are researchers as quantified selves structurally defined & generated,
maintained, culled or lauded? (see Spitzer, 1975)
The higher
education context
• The broader higher
education context
• The move to digital and
networked identities
• The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified self
The
researcher
as
quantified
self

29. https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/9309088371/ http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self
We monitor ourselves. We monitor each other.
We are monitored…

30. I am my data.
I am what I share.
If I did not share it on Facebook, did it happen?
Image credit:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bot%C3%B3n_Me_gusta.svg

31. Jennifer Ringely – 1996-2003 – webcam
Source: http://onedio.com/haber/tum-zamanlarin-
en-etkili-ve-onemli-internet-videolari-36465
“Secrets are lies”
“Sharing is caring”
“Privacy is theft”
(Eggers, 2013, p. 303)

32. Five modes of self-tracking (Lupton, 2014c)
1. Private self-tracking: Achieving self-awareness, improving
life-quality – what I did, how I did it and what I’ve learned
2. Pushed self-tracking: Voluntarily but encouraged/rewarded
3. Communal self-tracking: Sharing your numbers – the
quantified us – “I ran so far…”, “I took so many steps”, “I have
so many new Twitter followers”, etc
4. Imposed self-tracking: Compulsory, productivity self-tracking
devices
5. Exploited self-tracking: Commercialisation of personal data
(Also see Lupton 2014a, 2014b)

33. The quantified (digital) self: some considerations
• The potential & limitations of “self knowledge through
numbers”
• Collecting my data & tracking myself as a way “to talk back”, to
“contest”, to formulate counter-narratives
• The dangers of exploitation of my data
• The nature, use & misuse of digital, (a)synchronous peer-review
• The virtue of forgetting in a digital age…
• The bias of algorithms
• The secret lives of our data-doubles (Lupton, 2014a)
• I am more than what I share, what can be counted – I am more
than my data

34. Deviants or heroes:
The net effect of being
quantified & classified
“Academic labor and performance anxiety”: where the “shame [of not
performing] becomes a central tenet of everyday academic life”
(Richard Hall (2014a, par. 2)
Academics “overwork because the current culture in universities is
brutally and deliberately invested in shaming those who don’t
compete effectively…” in stark contrast with the heroic few who do,
somehow, meet the shifting goalposts (Kate Bowles, 2014, par. 7-8)
Image credits: http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Superman_S_sym
bol.svg
We acknowledge the
exhilaration, the abundance, the
networks, but…

35. (Re)considering scholarship: From quantified selves to
qualified selves…
• We cannot & should not ignore our context in the context of the
quantification fetish in higher education
• As a researcher, I am much more than my data, my citations, the number
of followers on Twitter, the number of hits on my blog
• I can, however, use my networks & online presences to play the field,
increase my impact & reach
• “Scholarship is not just about publication, but about interaction,
interpretation, exchange, deliberation, discourse, debate, and
controversy” (Gray, 2013, par. 5). Scholarship is therefore “not just the
production of text” but in its essence about “the way in which
constellations of people and objects produce meaning, understanding
and insight, through interaction, acts of interpretation” (Gray, 2013, par.
6)

37. Goodier, S., & Czerniewicz, L. (2012). Academics’ online presence. A four-step guide to taking control of your visibility. Retrieved from
http://www.academia.edu/2279505/Academics_online_presence_A_four-step_guide_to_taking_control_of_your_visibility

38. What type of sociocultural, political, economic &
regulatory contexts creates the notion and praxis of the researcher as
quantified self?
How are researchers as quantified selves structurally defined &
generated, maintained, culled or lauded? (see Spitzer, 1975)
The higher
education context
• The broader higher
education context
• The move to digital and
networked identities
• The (changing) rules of
performing research
The notion and
practices of the
quantified self
The
researcher
as
quantified
self
(In)conclusions

39. Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! "
Eagles – Hotel California

40. THANK YOU
Paul Prinsloo
Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)
College of Economic and Management Sciences, Office number 3-15, Club 1,
Hazelwood, P O Box 392
Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)
T: +27 (0) 82 3954 113 (mobile)
prinsp@unisa.ac.za
Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog: http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp

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44. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International License.