While I’ve been micro-blogging away about my comings and goings on @barbarahui, my macro-blog here at barbarahui.net has been eerily quiet. What with the year changing and all of that, I thought I’d take a bit of time to reflect back on the past 6 months or so in a brand spanking new post.
My summer began with a trip to Fairfax, Virginia for THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp). The good people at CHNM have created something wonderful in THATCamp: it’s a user-generated unconference on digital humanities, which means that the organizational principles are quite different from those I’ve experienced at any other academic conference. And I have to say that it was hands-down the most productive, friendly, conversational, collaborative, egalitarian academic conference I’ve ever attended. And the quality of ideas and materials were not compromised, contrary to what some might think. Get ~100 super-smart, geeky/nerdy academicky types together and force everybody to check their egos in at the door, and watch great things happen.
Follow @THATCampSoCal on Twitter for information on a regional THATCamp in Southern CA, happening March 13-14 at Occidental College! Web site will be up soon too, and I’ll post the link here. (I’m not the main organizer, but am helping out).
The rest of the summer was spent here at home in East Hollywood (with a couple of brief forays out of town) writing my dissertation and working as a developer on Tim Tangherlini’s Danish Folklore project. I also took on the job of a writing computer program for a UCLA English professor that parsed the digitized text of Piers Plowman. This was pretty fun given that a) I’d read PP in college, and b) the fact that Middle English still has yogh (Ȝ ȝ) and thorn (Þ, þ) characters. Those of you who’ve experienced the joys of working with “non-standard” (i.e. non-English) character-sets and computers know what I’m talking about. I used Perl for its regex features–this was also somehow fun since I haven’t used Perl since about 2000 when I was still working for Berkeley. Ah, the geekery.
I made some decent progress on my dissertation over the summer, and was particularly motivated at the prospect of going on (drumroll please) the academic job market this academic year. I knew that the market was tough, but I hoped that I would have some chance at a job given that my specialization is in a field that’s arguably expanding rather than contracting. So September-October and into November and trickling into December, I spent many hours preparing job applications. Those of you in academia know that this is no small matter. One application, for example, asked for the following:
- cover letter
- C.V.
- writing Sample (25-30 pages)
- statement of current and future research interests
- statement of teaching philosophy and experience
- 2 sample syllabi
- 3 recommendations
I spent numerous hours putting together these materials, customizing and sending off the various packages. I consulted with my advisors, attended job market workshops at UCLA, gave a mock interview, and tried my best to keep working on my dissertation through it all.
Long story short, I didn’t get a single nibble in response to the applications I sent out. Instead, I got a number of rejection letters, many of them citing 400, 600, even 900 applicants for a single position. Yikes. I’ve known from the beginning that it’d be rough, but this is really rough. As the NY Times reported, the number of humanities professorship jobs in the U.S. has dropped ~35% since last year, which was already down ~25% from the year before.
I’m definitely not alone, as both the statistics and an informal survey of my colleagues bears out. Those people I know who do have interviews have them for adjunct, lecturer, or otherwise short-term positions. As Brian Croxall explains in The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty, contingent faculty make up the bulk of the academic workforce today, and this isn’t a sustainable situation. Of course we knew this already (well, some of us, anyway), but maybe the fact that Brian’s piece was picked up by The Chronicle of Higher Ed means that those at top are finally getting it?
In any event, the whole experience has been a very sobering one. At the same time, I can’t say that I haven’t been realistic about the situation all along, and that I also haven’t been open to alternative post-doctoral careers. In fact, in addition to the professorial jobs, I am also applying to what some people on Twitter are labeling #alt-ac (alternative-academic) jobs–and I did get to the final round of interviews for one. The challenge now is to find a position in which I can utilize the full range of my skills, training and experience (technical and humanities).
Aside from the Job Market Epic Fail, I’ve found my research and work pretty fulfilling this past year. I made progress on my dissertation and Litmap, and have received much interest in them both. One chapter of the dissertation will be published in a book forthcoming in 201o (more info to come). Although writing continues to be the hardest thing I do, it’s probably also the most rewarding when I actually sit down and do it! I recently discovered Scrivener for Mac OS, which I absolutely love and highly recommend as a writing composition framework/tool, by the way.
On the programming side of things, I did a lot of database work leading up to the fantastic Orient North: Mapping Nordic Literary Culture conference at UCLA in early December, at which the Mapping Danish Folklore, Ibsen Elsewhere and Mapping Icelandic Manuscript Production projects were featured. Coming off those projects, I was hired by UCHRI as the lead programmer for the Digital Media Learning Competition, which was picked up as part of Obama’s new STEM educational initiative. In sum: busy, busy, busy, but fulfilling in that I’m getting to keep up my programming chops, work in all kinds of environments and with new people, and see how people are using technology in all kinds of innovative ways.
I also have a cool little gig along with Brian Croxall working for the Scholars’ Lab / NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, helping put together a clearinghouse of resources for humanities scholars working with geospatial/GIS tools. And last but not least, I’m going to geek summer school! Oh, and did I mention that I’m planning on filing my dissertation at the beginning of June? Time to get writing.
On to 2010!
RT @theHapacalypse: Oh no! RT @LAist Silver Lake’s ‘Walking Man’ Marc Abrams Found Dead in Hot Tub http://bit.ly/a0TR8j #
