Digital

22 MODERATING A MEANINGFUL DH CONVERSATION
for academic positions. In his essay “Digital Humanities and the ‘Ugly
Stepchildren’ of American Higher Education,” Luke Waltzer describes the
downturn in the humanities job market and the concurrent flourishing of
DH and alternative-academic (alt-ac) positions and initiatives in IOHE as
well as in governmental and private funding bodies, such as the National
Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) Office of the Digital Humanities,
HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory),
Google, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, to name a few. 4
This increase in industry support for technological approaches to humanities
research and teaching is likewise reflected in academic job ads.
According to the MLA Office of Research, “ads tagged with the index term
‘technology and digital media’ represented 19.0% of ads in the English
edition (up from 7.7% in 2003–04, when this option first appeared) and
10.2% of ads in the foreign language edition (up from 5.9% in 2003–04).” 5
A simple job search on the 2013 MLA JIL with “digital humanities” in the
description yielded 19 (of 259 total) results. Of these positions, several
exclusively sought DH experts and included the following titles: digital
humanities design consultant, director of digital studies center, assistant
professor in DH, postdoc in DH, assistant professor in emerging media.
Multiple other job descriptions seeking candidates for professorships in
literature and the environment, Shakespeare studies, eighteenth-century
and Victorian literature, and rhetoric and communication all listed DH as
a desirable subspecialty. Academic jobs now require expertise in multiple
areas, alongside teaching experience and an expectation that candidates
will already be published in their fields. Concurrently, many graduate students
are aware that the likelihood of securing a tenure-track position is
low enough that they must also market themselves to the growing nonacademic
and alt-ac employers, which are recruiting students with hybrid
expertise in technology and humanities.
The recent push to prepare students for alt-ac positions emerges in
the midst of a conventional and pervasive academic elitism that devalues
non-tenure-track faculty positions. Historically, the sentiment among academics
has been that students compromise or settle for something less
when they choose an alt-ac job, as these positions may be viewed as less