When outputs of artistic research meet academic infrastructures : Antelopes in the horse pen

Sammanfattning: Artistic research is a relatively new and understudied topic in scholarly communication within Library and information science. This knowledge deficit, combined with ill-fitting systems and categories, maintains the status of artistic research as something mysterious and different. As a result, knowledge produced through artistic research may not be justly represented in the academic infrastructures, and not be made available with the same integrity as traditional research output. The aim of this study is to map the publishing landscape of artistic research in Sweden and to describe how outputs of artistic research relate to current academic infrastructures. An inductive analysis of the units of academic output listed by the researchers themselves as publications of research shows how they are represented in, and outside of, the archiving systems. The analysis is supported by document theory, Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms, and the classification theory of Bowker and Star. Findings suggest that publishing practices on the level of each project are influenced by institutional affiliation. Researchers are forced to a trade-off between statistical visibility in institutional repositories and coherent content visualization in extra-institutional channels. The institutional infrastructures designed for traditional output lack guidance for artistic output, which results in in consistency in registration, poor quality of representation, and inconsistent metadata. Channels outside of the institution lack discoverability and statistical visibility.