Dear All,

Vis-a-vis Hugh Winfield’s last comment, as an outsider, but one who did look after an HER or two many moons ago, I’d like to raise a more theoretical perspective.

Much of the discussion so far has been of an empiricist character (one definition: undue reliance upon experience, practice or observation without recourse to theory or the science of the matter), seeing audits or benchmarking as a method to achieve practical outcomes such as ‘hard’ data, secure high-status posts, future funding or development.  I do not disagree that these may be worthwhile in themselves, but archaeology in all its facets is socially-embedded.  Benchmarking is part of a wider, longer-lasting regulatory process in our society.  Benchmarking is being applied to a whole range of human activities that a two or three decades ago would have been unthinkable.  It is a purposeful intrusion of bureaucracy to bring previously unpredictable or not-well-measured services & activities under scrutiny and/or control.  Whilst we may wish to embraced this intrusion as useful though domesticating, we can also decide not to embrace benchmarking, to pursue a wilder, more innovative, entrepreneurial, more risky, less constrained activity. 

Ben Jeffs’ exposition of the St Helena HER is heuristic.  What happens if data organising / analysing software becomes far freer & variable, allowing one to combine, store, reconstitute data in any way one likes?  Where does benchmarking fit if we are using a mixture of Google, Flickr, tumblr, Pinterest or Facebook data sets?  One could also embrace the Big Data approach where you just store data, not in any particular way or format or structure, and use proprietary algorithms to mine that data to provide the info required by researchers.  (Remember, each time you click on a ‘Like’ or a ‘Share’ in Facebook, it’s worth ~£2.50 to someone, somewhere)

The usefulness of HERs & their data, or any data set, is not governed by how well they are benchmarked, but by the imagination and analytical skill of the researcher.  In my view, while benchmarking may be useful for managers, it is a ‘dead hand’ that eventually stifles innovation, is a drag on change, and encourages a ‘bean-counter’ attitude to the past, our past, which is appropriated and re-cast by each succeeding generation. 

Sorry that this is more of an opening gambit rather than fully argued discourse, but did want to keep things short.

Cheers,

Neil Campling