Text analysis of 2012 Digital Humanities Job Adverts

wordcloud-dhjobs

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:

Word Count
digital 1082
research 650
university 577
experience 499
library 393
humanities 386
work 334
information 303
position 299
project 269
applications 257
new 223
faculty 222
development 216
collections 210
department 207
management 206
projects 195
knowledge 192
data 187
including 185
ability 182
services 180
teaching 180
history 177
libraries 176
skills 176
qualifications 172
technology 169
required 166
media 163
jobs 151
application 149
original 146
program 145
link 143
web 143
working 142
loading 140
related 140
staff 138
academic 137
communication 133
job 132
college 130
degree 127
professor 126
education 125
students 125
studies 123

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