Reading DH Job Ads

Job ads in higher education are confusing. This is especially true of digital humanities positions that can combine multiple positions—faculty, staff, student—into one. Students might have a particularly hard time decoding these job ads. I often find that the fellows I work with need some help learning to read and decipher these postings so they can feel confident seeking out and applying for their first DH job. The Association for Computers in the Humanities sometimes runs panels designed to discuss these skills. I thought I would share my own professional development activity that I often run with students to build this literacy.

You will need:

• Three printed DH job ads
  • This can be tricky, as most job ads disappear once they are filled. You can still find some evidence of a posting here or there from organizations that crosspost them outside of the institutional HR site. H-net has a series of job listings, for example, and Code4Lib does not seem to take down their copies of old jobs. I think it works well to have different kinds of jobs in the mix - one faculty, one administrator, and one programer position, for example.
• A space for conversation
  • If it’s just you and one other person you could go for coffee. Otherwise I could imagine this working in small groups.
• 60 minutes for the activity

From there, I have students spend roughly 10 minutes looking at a job and 10 minutes discussing it before repeating twice more for the other two positions. As they move through, I ask students what they notice about each job:

• What seems consistent?
• What is different about each position?
• What is confusing?
• What would make them confident applying to it?

As I go, I balance the students’ reflections with my own, and I try to guide the conversation around a specific set of topics that students are most likely to need help understanding: qualifications, responsibilities, the institutional history, and the ethics of the job. Below I share some of the things I try to point out in those conversations.

Qualifications

While qualifications often aren’t the first part of a job posting, they’re frequently the thing that students gravitate towards when seeing an ad for the first time. I think this comes from a position of anxiety. Students often are insecure in their own qualifications, and so they see a list of skills and methods and immediately feel like they don’t qualify. So some familiarity in how to understand lists of qualifications might be helpful. To begin, I often tell students to look for specific words like “and” or “or.” Does the job ask for Python, R, and JavaScript? Or does the job ask for just one of the three? Sometimes, this might even be worded as “the ability to solve technical problems with a programming language of your choice.” These distinctions might seem small, but they are often an indicator of whether or not a job is looking for a unicorn—a position that wants you to be expert in everything under the sun. In a list that asks for one or two skills out of a list you can often take them at their word. Pay attention to whether the job gives you opportunity to not know everything.

I often describe a DH job as consisting of many different kinds of buckets where each category corresponds to specific topics or methods. Some examples of these might include critical making, text analysis, 3D modeling, GIS, programming, database design, digital archives, or more. Together, in some combination, these buckets make up a job. A person. No one will actually have expertise in every single one of these things. But most professional DHers are familiar some arrangement of them and expert in a smaller subset. I often encourage students to think of themselves in these terms when starting out: identify one specific area of expertise and and then several more for familiarity.¹ I encourage the students to see the big buckets. What are they familiar with? What do they have expertise in? Sometimes a job posting will list “preferred qualifications,” a handy way to directly map the job needs to your own hierarchy of familiarity and expertise. I encourage students not to be dismayed if the position in front of them does not match up to their own profile. Instead, think about how they can develop a plan to grow the timeframe that they have. They might not fit this job, but they can have the right buckets next time.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities for a position are often where you can find out what the job will actually be doing, so it can be helpful to read these in conversation with the listed skills and qualifications. Sometimes they will give you a sense of what skills are actually likely to be key and which are more icing on the cake. If the qualifications don’t seem to line up to the responsibilities that’s probably an indication that the job might be an untenable one, or that it might be pulled in too many directions. Approach these gigs with caution.

Digital Humanities positions can be a whole broad range of things. Sometimes the job titles aren’t very descriptive. You might see something like a DH specialist, a DH coordinator, a DH librarian, and those words don’t necessarily tell you a lot about the specific institutional needs for that position. The same job title can mean very different things at different places. The responsibilities are where you were more typically find more about what would actually be asked of you. Sometimes the descriptions of responsibilities are not especially helpful. They might list things like “responsible for collaborating with faculty,” “teaches a variety of workshops,” or other kinds of generic descriptors that might only give you a general indication of what the job is. Sometimes, you’ll be luckier. An ad might list the specific projects that you would be directly involved in overseeing and implementing, as in “responsible for the development and maintenance of a digital archive of XYZ.” Those are things to note and to speak to in a cover letter and interview. But even if they aren’t explicitly listed in the position description you can often do some research on the institutional history to fill out what is left unsaid. More below.

Institutional History

Now we’re getting into a place where humanities research skills can really shine. While the institutional history of a position often isn’t technically a specific part of the job description, it can teach you an awful lot. You can learn a lot by by exploring a series of questions:

• Is this job a new job?
• Is it re-hiring someone who left?
• Is it for a grant?

You can often find some of this information by looking back at an organization’s website, on their blog, event pages, and more. Did someone seem to be in this role before that you can identify? While position re-hires are often opportunities to rethink what a particular job does, you can get a lot of valuable information by trying to flag exactly what the previous person in this position was doing. What kind of projects and events did they seem to be talking about? Those were likely their direct work responsibilities, and you can sometimes map those directly onto what the new job is asking of you. While you might not want to speak with full confidence in a cover letter, you could reference the history of the work this role seemed to do in a way that shows your familiarity with the institution. Similarly, if the job appears new, that would seem to suggest that the institution is committing to a new kind of work. Does the job correspond to specific initiatives or efforts? Sometimes this information will be in the job description directly. If the position is grant-funded you can often find that information either in the job description itself or in a grant announcement. If the grant was specifically awarded for a digital archiving project, you can assume that digital archiving skills are likely to be essential for it. Whereas if they are hiring for a DH generalist and list digital archives as just one of many responsibilities, you can assume that such work will just be one of many things you would take on. This kind of information can help you to assess how qualified you are, how to talk about specific elements from your background, and whether or not the job is for you.

On Job Ethics

Given my own convictions about labor transparency and ethics, I like to point out any potential issues with the jobs we are looking at. Are we looking at a job with a fixed term? Is it renewable? Is the salary livable? Does it seem to be doing too much? Is this a job that has been posted many times and never filled? Is the institution known to be toxic? Some of this will only come with experience in the field, but you can also give the students a bit of literacy in how to perform a smell test of a particular job ad. Of course, each individual will have their own set of circumstances to weigh when applying to any given position. And a one-year, fixed position might make a lot of sense for someone who is local. But I always want to make sure that students know the issues with jobs like these and how untenable they can be. We often don’t locally advertise jobs to our students in the Lab if they don’t pass the smell test unless we know of people whose specific goals and geographic limitations match up with a particular opportunity. At the very least, we want to make sure that students enter into the job search with eyes open.

There is much more to say, of course, but hopefully this quick writeup gives someone out there the tools they need to run this activity for themselves. I find that it helps to demystify the DH job market for students and helps them feel empowered to take that next step themselves. Perhaps most importantly, it starts to peel back obscuring layers of HR-ness and starts to make DH as a professional field a bit more transparent. That’s often the first step towards students feeling more invited into the professional community, and it can help them make a plan for developing the kind of institutional profile that they will need to apply successfully in the future.