Text analysis of 2012 Digital Humanities Job Adverts

2012 was a good year for hirings in the digital humanities. See for yourself at this archive of DH jobs: http://jobs.lofhm.org/ Now: what do these job adverts tell us, if you’re a graduate student trying to find your way?

Next week, I’m speaking to the Underhill Graduate Students’ Colloquium at Carleton University on ‘Living the life electric: becoming a digital humanist’. It’s broadly autobiographical in that I’ll talk about my own idiosyncratic path into this field.

That’s quite the point: there’s no firm/accepted/typical/you-ought-to-do X recipe for becoming a digital humanist. You have to find your own way, though the growing body of courses, books, journals, blog-o-sphere and twitterverse certainly makes a huge difference.

But in the interests of providing perhaps a more satisfying answer, I’ll try my hand at data mining those job posts (some 150 of them) using Voyant and MALLET to see what augurs for the future of the field.

Feel free to explore the corpus uploaded into Voyant. In any graphs you produce, January is on the left, December is on the right. If you spot anything interesting/curious, let me know.

And, because word counts are amazing: