Digital Humanities Jobs

A professor who has been gently mocking my interest in digital humanities now thinks there may be something to it, since a number of job postings that mention digital humanities appear on this year’s MLA job list.  Yes indeed, it does seem that some exciting DH job postings have been popping up over the past few months, including:

• Assistant or associate professor, digital humanities and nineteenth-century literature, British or American, University of Nebraska
• Tenure-track digital historian, Center for History and New Media, George Mason
• Web programmer, Center for History and New Media, George Mason
• Assistant Professor in Literature and Media, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Assistant or Associate Professor, Department of French Studies, University of Waterloo (Canada)
• Librarian for Digital Humanities Research, Yale
• Digital Humanities Specialist, Stanford, Academic Computing
• Arts and Humanities Digital Initiatives Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
• Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Cultural Mapping, UCLA
• Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (2009-11), Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory  (ETCL) at the University of Victoria
• Professor of e-History, The University of Queensland (Australia)

Some job ads mention digital humanities as a desired area of specialty or suggest that the successful applicant could participate in the digital humanities program, e.g.

• Assistant Professor of English, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania: Shakespeare + digital humanities
• Assistant Professor of English (contemporary literature and culture) at Texas A&M
• Assistant or Advanced Assistant Professor, U of Michigan Department of English
• Assistant, Associate or Full Professor in Romantic Poetry, Miami University

So is digital humanities emerging as a hot new field?   Well, maybe–but whereas a search for “digital humanities” at the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s careers site brings up 5 results (clearly not every open job in DH), a search for “transnational” yields 40 results, and “cultural studies” 28.  Still, it seems that there are a wider range of opportunities in the digital humanities.  Most of the jobs in, say, transnational studies are faculty posts, whereas we see digital humanities jobs in libraries, humanities centers, and academic computing departments as well as in academic departments. (Tom Scheinfeldt recently wrote a great post about the need to establish employment models for non-tenure-track researchers and developers working on digital humanities projects at universities.)

Perhaps one indicator of DH’s increasing visibility is the push-back against it.  In his jeremiad about the “trendism” of MLA job list as a sign of the decline of literary studies, William Deresiewicz declares,  “There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called ‘digital humanities.'”  In a recent online forum hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a contributor noted that several colleagues work on digital humanities and that “I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of us in the department have absolutely no idea what they do or what they’re talking about when they try to explain it. In fact, we are not sure they understand what they do. However, it seems to be very sexy and attracts a lot of grant funding. I can’t help wondering if it’s just a fad and will die out soon.” But maybe not understanding what you do is a sign of emergence.  Anyway, when I asked a group of “traditional” humanities professors recently if they thought digital humanities was just a fad, they responded emphatically that it was not, arguing that information increasingly is in a digital format and that scholars need to understand how to work in the digital environment. I agree.

So what skills should an aspiring digital humanist cultivate?  When I started working at Virginia’s Electronic Text Center way back in the 1990s, David Seaman, the director, told me that he viewed an understanding of the humanities as being most important, since most people can pick up the technical skills much more easily than they can the disciplinary knowledge.  That makes sense to me, although technical skills are also important.  Of course, the requirements for each position differ, particularly when you’re comparing library or IT positions to faculty positions.  However, many employers seem to emphasize a similar set of skills:

• strong humanities background
• understanding of the research process and emerging technologies for humanities research (data mining, visualization, mashups, social networking, etc)
• strong written and oral communication skills
• knowledge of XML (e.g. TEI), XSLT, and related technologies
• ability to work well on a team
• database design and development skills
• web development skills (PHP, CSS, etc)
• programming & scripting skills
• project management experience
• experience with user-centered design