[Cross-posted at the Scholars’ Lab site.]

Already familiar with the background of this project? Jump straight to the survey results.

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Graduate students in the humanities thinking about their future careers face a fundamental incongruity: though humanities scholars thrive in a wide range of positions, many graduate programs operate as though every PhD student will become a tenured professor. While the disconnect between the number of tenure-track jobs available and the single-minded focus with which graduate programs prepare students for that specific career is not at all new, the problem is becoming ever more urgent due to the increasing casualization of academic labor, as well as the high levels of debt that many students bear once they complete their degrees.

Before I say anything more, though, I’d like to dispel a couple of associations that the title of my talk might call to mind.

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First, I don’t intend to compare the humanities as a discipline to Prometheus, though at times the angst of the job market may make it feel like an apt image.

I also don’t mean to imply that the humanities are unraveling, though there is a useful connection to be made with that language. You may recall a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Bérubé, past president of the Modern Language Association, which was called “Humanities Unraveled.” In the article, Bérubé refers to the humanities as “a seamless garment of crisis”—noting that every element, from the dissertation, to scholarly publishing, to time-to-degree, to labor issues, are so deeply interrelated and in such advanced states of disrepair that it feels impossible to pull on one thread without the entire system coming apart. Bérubé’s article does an excellent job of showing the ways in which these elements fit together, and why it’s imperative that we not lose sight of the system as a whole and the many points of intersection as we work to find solutions.

As important as that is, it isn’t quite what I want the focus of this talk to be.

Instead, the connection I want to make is something a bit more positive. I think that the discipline of the humanities should be disentangled—or, unbound—from the rigid academic pathway leading to the single goal of the tenure track job.

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Instead of imagining graduate school as a pipeline, keeping everyone contained and moving in one direction to a pre-determined endpoint, what if we thought more about a sprinkler, with water exploding out in all directions?

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It’s a rather simplistic metaphor, but I do think it’s a helpful image, especially since its outward spray is reminiscent of something that is not only practical, but that also brings joy.

Rather than focusing academic work inwardly, exclusively within academic institutions, humanities programs should be preparing students for much more flexibility in terms of audience and engagement. Even traditional scholarship has a growing potential to reach a wider and less specialized audience as scholarly publishing increasingly moves to open-access venues. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Scholars are publicly working through ideas on blogs and on Twitter, reaching a range of people from personal contacts, scholars, and grad students to interested strangers. Digital humanities projects are often public-facing and open to specialists and amateurs alike. And of course, people working in environments like museums, libraries, and presses have tangible public impact. Some humanities disciplines, such as history, do have a strong tradition in public engagement; public history is a well-developed sub-discipline, and many scholars work in museums, government, archives, and so on. But even there, the public branch has often been considered distinct from—and, unfortunately, less prestigious than—the research-focused side of the discipline.

The humanities must get more serious about its role relative to the public for a number of reasons. First, if we believe that our work can be a social good, with broad relevance to our cultures and societies, then we should be attentive to the public value of that work for reasons intrinsic to the work itself. Second, as public funding for the humanities becomes increasingly scarce, we must make a case for continued and strengthened support. If our work is not even visible, let alone relevant, to more than an academic audience, then we will have a weak case indeed. Third, it has long been the case that a large proportion of graduates engage in careers outside the professoriate, and yet those roles have typically been undervalued. We owe it to current and future graduate students to equip them for a broader range of roles, and to attribute to those roles the merit that they deserve. Embracing a broad spectrum of career options—in and around universities, as well as cultural heritage organizations, non-profits, government, and the private sector—won’t fix everything, but it would represent a significant step in the right direction.

Graduate programs can help prepare their students for a much broader professional world than simply the professoriate, but lacking data or strong models, it can be extremely difficult for individual programs to know what kinds of changes would be effective, and also to make a case for those changes. That’s why the Scholarly Communication Institute embarked on its recent study of perceptions of career preparation among humanities scholars: to determine a baseline from which to make specific recommendations for curricular changes.

In the absence of data that we thought was a crucial foundation for reform, SCI decided to survey what has come to be known as the “alt-ac” community. But first we had to think about how to answer a common question: what does alt-ac even mean?

The term was coined—more or less accidentally—in a 2009 Twitter conversation between Bethany Nowviskie (of UVa and SCI) and Jason Rhody (at the National Endowment for the Humanities). Short for “alternative academic,” the term became useful shorthand to refer to jobs in and around the academy, but outside the professoriate. At the time, jobs tended to be classified as either “academic” or “non-academic,” with everything outside the professoriate being relegated to the “non” category. But many scholars—including Nowviskie and Rhody—were (and are) doing innovative, productive, thought-provoking work in all kinds of positions. “Alt-ac” was a way to capture the kind of intellectually-stimulating roles that at that time were being brushed aside as viable scholarly career paths. Nowviskie went on to create #Alt-Academy, an online volume of essays treating a range of topics related to the pursuit and development of these various careers.

Because the term is not at all formal, it means different things to different people. While the concept is something that people are eager to talk about, and while the term itself has both expanded in meaning and proven useful beyond what was initially imagined, there’s also a certain degree of discomfort with the phrase. Some find that it perpetuates an unfortunate (and false) binary of career options or reinforces the primacy of tenure-track employment—which, of course, is exactly what it was meant to alleviate. Others simply don’t find that the term resonates for them, considering it too narrow, or redundant with existing categories. Still others have expressed concern that #alt-ac is being held up as an unrealistic panacea for the perpetually abysmal academic job market, yet without necessarily creating new jobs.

All of these are valid critiques, and really, I would love it if the term became unnecessary and we could simply speak of career choices without the looming dominance of the tenure track. Until that day comes, I tend to take a broad view of what “alt-ac” can signify, and I’ll continue to use it here as shorthand for a wide variety of career paths. I’m actually quite comfortable with the unsettled nature of the term, as I think that it helps us to continue having useful and important conversations. I highlight the disagreement just to say that because of the differing understandings of the term, before we could even begin to study the various constellations of alternative academic careers, we needed a better idea of who felt that the terminology resonated with the kind of work they were doing.

To get a sense of what others mean by “alt-ac”, we took the exploratory step of creating a public database where people could voluntarily add their names to a loose, public community of other alt-ac practitioners. We built the database within the framework of the #Alt-Academy project in order to leverage the energy of existing conversations, then stepped back to see what the results would be. We quickly had over two hundred and fifty entries from individuals in many different positions. Browsing the database is a great starting point for grad students or others who want to see the kinds of work that humanists are doing in the world. It’s still open to new entries, so feel free to check it out and add your own name if you think of your work along these lines.

Once we created the database, we moved on to the second, more formal phase of the study, which included two confidential surveys. The primary survey targeted people with advanced humanities degrees who self-identify as working in alternative academic careers—precisely the people who identified themselves in the database, and we so we used the database as an initial source of potential respondents. The secondary survey targeted employers that oversee people with advanced humanities degrees. By questioning both, we were able to gain a more well-rounded perspective that balances some of the challenges inherent in self-reported answers.

A couple of things about the response rate highlighted important discrepancies. We set an initial goal of 200 responses on the main survey, and 100 on the employer survey. Responses to the main survey totaled nearly 800 when we closed it, for almost four times our goal.

Interestingly, this is a much higher number than the public database saw, despite the fact that, first, the survey required a more significant investment of time, and second, it was open for responses during a much shorter window than the database, which is still open now. I suspect that this is in part due to a lingering discomfort with publicly stating that one has pursued a path outside the professoriate; in fact, when the database launched, a number of people contacted me to say that while they supported the project, they didn’t want advisors or others from their institution to know the kind of work they were doing. I find this incredibly distressing.

The employer survey, on the other hand, attracted far fewer responses, totaling around 75. This is a significant finding in itself, as it shows a pronounced disconnect between the motivations of job seekers compared to employers in thinking through the issues at hand. The questions of career paths and graduate education reform are understandably much more urgent for those that have gone through the process and made any number of difficult decisions.

Now, to turn to the data.

Much of the data from the surveys will be unsurprising to people who have already been thinking about these questions. As we might anticipate, people report entering graduate school expecting to become professors; they receive very little advice or training for any other career; and yet many different circumstances lead them into other paths. But even if the broad contours of the results are unsurprising, the specific data is useful to ground the general anecdotal impressions that many of us have long shared. Indeed, one of the primary goals of the survey is to help move the conversation from anecdote to data.

For instance, asked to identify the career or careers they expected to pursue when they started graduate school, 74% indicated that they expected to obtain positions as tenure-track professors. As you can see, that response far outpaces any others, even though respondents could select multiple options. (As an aside, that’s also why the results here and on many subsequent slides add up to more than 100%. Because so many alt-ac positions are hybrid, we didn’t want to limit people to one option in their responses.)

What is perhaps more interesting is their level of confidence: of that 74%, 80% report feeling fairly certain or completely certain that professorship was the career they would pursue.

Keep in mind that because we targeted alt-ac practitioners, none of the survey respondents are tenured or tenure-track professors; they are all working in other domains. So even among the body of people who are working in other roles, the clear expectation at the outset of graduate school was for a future career as a professor.

These expectations are not at all aligned with the realities of the academic job market, and they haven’t been for some time. The labor equation for university teaching has continued to shift dramatically in recent years, with non-tenure-track and part-time labor constituting a majority of instructional roles. The 2011 report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates reported another alarming statistic: 43% of humanities PhD recipients have no job or postdoctoral commitment on graduation—and that’s for any commitment, including temporary or contingent positions. Many graduate students begin their studies without a clear picture of their future employment prospects. What this signals to me is that we are failing at bringing informed students into the graduate education system.

But whose responsibility is it to provide information about career prospects? It seems clear to me that it’s something that must be addressed before graduate education begins, and then reiterated in the admissions process and throughout the program, ideally by a trusted advisor. To be honest, I see this as an ethical issue: it is deeply problematic to admit students to a program if their expectations for the program’s outcome are not accurate. This is even more true if students are admitted to unfunded positions and must incur debt as they earn their degrees.

Deepening the problem, students report receiving little or no preparation for careers outside the professoriate, even though we’re at a moment when the need for information about a variety of careers is most acute. Only 18% reported feeling satisfied or very satisfied with the preparation they received for alternative academic careers.

The responses are rooted in perception, so there may be resources available that students are not taking advantage of—but whatever the reason, they do not feel that they are being adequately prepared. Again, this probably comes as no surprise, but it does reveal that we have significant room for improvement.

Many programs have access to two rich resources that they leave untapped: their own staff, and their own graduates.

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An easy first step for universities to take would be to list all of their non-professorial staff members that hold PhDs. Stanford has done something like this, compiling information about people in the Stanford system (including the Press and Libraries) that are willing to serve as mentors for humanities graduate students. Stanford has also developed a speaker series that highlights scholars working in hybrid and non-faculty roles on campus.

Tracking graduates is a little more complicated, but no less important. There may be confidentiality issues involved, but there are surely ways that positions could be reported in aggregate and supplemented with a few individual examples. The more significant hurdle is that because prestige continues to be linked to tenure-track placement rate, many programs either do not track the careers of anyone outside this category, or if they do, they do not publish the information they have for fear (I suspect) of tarnishing their reputation relative to other schools.

But the vibrant alt-ac movement suggests that the time is ripe to measure prestige in other ways. I would think that programs would be eager to publicize the often high-level alt-ac careers of their graduates, and that such information could be a strong draw for prospective students. I’ve long wondered why graduate programs find it so difficult to track their former students, when development offices seem to be the very first to know the whereabouts of alumni. New research by a third-party consultancy, the Lilli Research Group, has shown that it’s possible to determine the professional outcomes of graduates with a surprising degree of accuracy, even using only public records, but I think that this work should be taken on internally. Programs simply must do a better job of knowing what kinds of work their graduates are doing.

So, where are people working after graduate school? As you can see, instead of the professoriate, the respondents reported working in a number of different types of workplaces. A large majority of respondents categorized their positions as being within universities, libraries, and other cultural heritage organizations.

Parenthetically, this is one area where the definition of alt-ac gets fuzzy; some people prefer to think of alternative academic careers as only those that are within the university. I’ve mentioned that I take a broader view. Personally, I think it’s useful to consider not so much a specific job or career, but rather an approach: a way of seeing one’s work through the lens of academic training, and of incorporating scholarly methods into the way that work is done. It means engaging in work with the same intellectual curiosity that fueled the desire to go to graduate school in the first place, and applying the same kinds of skills—be they close reading, historical inquiry, written argumentation, or whatever else—to the tasks at hand. Thinking this way encourages us to seek out the unexpected places where people are finding their intellectual curiosity piqued and their research skills tested and sharpened.

The next slide might actually be a bit of a pleasant surprise. Despite a concern that encouraging graduate students to pursue more varied lines of employment pushes them into short-term positions with unstable funding, in fact relatively few respondents report this as their situation. Only 18% are in positions currently funded wholly or partially by grants, and, while this chart doesn’t show it, just 5% are in positions with a specified end date.

That is not to say that alternative academic positions are a quick fix; after all, we’re not talking about creating new jobs where none existed, but rather about recognizing existing opportunities. I especially want to reiterate that issues surrounding the academic labor market are pervasive and serious, particularly as universities rely on contingent labor to an ever-greater degree. But there are good, solid opportunities available that should figure into the ways that we train and advise graduate students. And the public will benefit from the perspective and expertise of humanities scholars whose voice extends beyond the classroom or academic journal.

The reasons that people pursue careers beyond the tenure track are varied and complex. Location tops the list, which makes sense as a contrast to the near total lack of geographic choice afforded by academic job searches.

Beyond that, people report pursuing alt-ac jobs for reasons ranging from the practical and immediate—salary, benefits, family considerations—to more future- and goal-oriented reasons, such as the desire to gain new skills, contribute to society, and advance in one’s career. Many people filled in their own responses as well, with the most common trends in the open text field being a desire for greater freedom, dissatisfaction with what a faculty career would look like, and much more simply, the need to find a job. A note of urgency and, sometimes, desperation came through in a number of these responses.

Keeping in mind that the employer sample was quite small compared to the main sample (and therefore less reliable), I’d like to look at some of the competencies that both groups considered important to the alt-ac positions that they hold or supervise. Some of the skills are core elements of graduate work, such as writing, research skills, and analytical skills. Both groups value many of the skills at similar levels; however, there are a couple of discrepancies.

I find it particularly interesting that alt-ac employees undervalued their research skills relative to employers. I suspect that there are two reasons for this: first, there may be some activities that employees do not recognize as research because it leads to a different end result (such as a decision being made, rather than a journal article being published). Second, it may be a skill that has become so natural that former grad students fail to recognize it as something that sets them apart in their jobs.

On the other hand, alt-ac employees tended to overvalue the importance of project management among the competencies that their jobs required. That said, project management actually tops the list of areas where alt-ac employees needed training, according to employers:

To me, this suggests that employees overvalued the skill because they found it to be a challenging skill that they needed to learn on the job, and so it took on an outsized importance in their minds.

Employers also cited technical and managerial skills as areas that needed training. While the importance of those two skills would certainly depend on the type of position, others, such as collaboration, are useful in almost any work environment. Even simple things, like adapting to office culture, can also prove to be surprisingly challenging if graduates have not had much work experience outside of universities.

The good news is that all of the elements that make stronger employees would also be hugely beneficial for those grads that do go on to become professors. While students are generally well prepared for research and teaching, they aren’t necessarily ready for the service aspect of a professorship, which incorporates many of the same skills that other employers seek. Many of the skills can also contribute to more creative teaching and research. By rethinking their curricula in such a way that students gain experience in things like collaborative project development and public engagement, departments would be strengthening their students’ future prospects regardless of the paths they choose to take.

It’s not surprising that employers find that alt-ac employees need training in skills like project management and collaboration. Employees themselves also recognize that these are by and large not skills that they acquire in graduate school. Even among those who felt that their skills in these areas were strong, they noted that they gained them outside of their graduate program—for instance, through jobs or internships.

Of course, the core skills of graduate training—especially research, writing, and analytical skills—are highly valued by employers. These skills are the reasons that employers will often hire PhDs even if the degree is not strictly required by the position. It’s important that students don’t undervalue (or insufficiently articulate) the ways that graduate study already equips them for broader roles, particularly in the methods and generalized skills that are critical to the process.

One thing seems clear: the persistent myth that there’s nothing but a single academic job market available to graduates is damaging, and extricating graduate education from the expectation of tenure-track employment has the potential to benefit students, institutions, and the health of the humanities more broadly. However, as long as norms are reinforced within departments—by faculty and students both—it will be difficult for any change to be effective.

Again, low tenure-track employment rates are not a new problem, but as the survey responses show, departments by and large are not succeeding at providing accurate and realistic information to their students, and many graduates still feel stigmatized when they pursue different types of careers.

For change to be possible, it’s essential that institutional norms and measures of prestige shift in favor of highlighting successful outcomes across a broader spectrum of possibilities. And it’s important that graduate programs begin exploring ways that they can better prepare their students while maintaining the integrity of humanistic scholarship.

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Admittedly, that can seem an incredibly difficult barrier to cross without successful examples to emulate. Having good models can not only ease the technical challenges of establishing a new program—like building support, establishing a program’s structure, and so on—but can also alleviate the potential social challenges of striking out on a new path.

To that end, SCI has just launched another project that we hope will be a useful complement to the survey data: the Praxis Network.

The Praxis Network is a new showcase of a small handful of truly excellent programs that are already up and running. Each of these programs can be thought of as one possible response to the question of how to equip emerging scholars for a range of career outcomes without sacrificing the core values or methodologies of the humanities, and without increasing time-to-degree.

Institutions that wish to explore making changes can really benefit from seeing existing models, but currently, finding information about, and comparing, some of these new programs can be quite challenging. There are a lot of reasons for this: for instance, they may be housed in different parts of their institutions—such as departments, traditional or digital humanities centers, or libraries. They are often, but not always, small and nimble. Most of all, they are all quite different, though there are trends and commonalities among them. We wanted to create a space that made it easy for people to see what makes these great programs tick, and we wanted to present the information in a way that makes sense for anyone, whether they are administrators, faculty, students, or the general public.

The site doesn’t aim to be a comprehensive database of all praxis-type programs; instead, it’s meant to be a small cross-section of programs that are different enough from one another that together they give an impression of the landscape.

The anchor of the network is UVa’s Praxis Program, which brings together interdisciplinary cohorts of six doctoral students to collectively build a single tool that will be useful for humanities research or pedagogy. In the course of the year-long fellowship, they learn technical skills and project management under the mentorship of the Scholars’ Lab research and development team. But they also learn innumerable “soft” skills as they navigate the creation of a group charter, determine their priorities, think through their disciplinary values and assumptions, blog about the process, and publicly launch the tool.

Along with UVa’s Praxis Program, which Bethany Nowviskie directs, we selected a few differently-inflected programs to highlight. Most are graduate programs. These include:

• the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, led by Ethan Watrall at Michigan State University;
• CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Fellows, under Matt Gold;
• the joint MA/MSc program in Digital Humanities at University College London, led by Simon Mahony;
• and the new PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, run by Cathy Davidson and David Bell.

We’re also working with two undergraduate programs:

• the Mellon Scholars program at Hope College, which William Pannapacker leads;
• and Brock University’s Interactive Arts and Science Program, under Kevin Kee.

For the moment, the website is the main product, and sharing information is the main goal. We hope that the ideas found on the site prove to be both useful and inspiring. There’s a wealth of exceptional work represented here, and we hope that it’s presented in a way that makes it easy for people to understand and compare various aspects of each program.

The mission of each program might be the category that has the greatest degree of similarity across institutions. The goals of each are student-focused, digitally-inflected, interdisciplinary, and frequently oriented around collaborative projects.

One common tenet is learning in public and exposing the process, warts and all. Many of the students grapple with the notion that our learning happens in unexpected ways—including through failure—and come to a greater degree of comfort with exposing their own uncertainties. Because humanities students are socialized to show their work only once it’s polished, this can be a very uncomfortable experience, but it’s one that leads to particularly fruitful results.

All of the programs encourage some kind of public engagement, whether through blogs, public-facing projects, or more traditional venues like conference presentations. Some of the programs include partnerships with local cultural heritage sites, tech companies, or other potential employers, which allows students to immediately see potential applications for the work they’re doing.

We then look at structure, which shows a lot more variety. Some of the programs are fellowships that offer a stipend, while others require tuition; they may be as short as five weeks, or as long as three years. They may be credit-bearing or extracurricular, with requirements that are formal or loose.

One thing worth noting here is that most of the programs are fairly small and competitive. This has some real advantages: students benefit from strong mentorship and close collaborations with one another in small cohorts. When other institutions move toward making praxis-like changes, they often take the form of these kinds of small, competitive programs. This is a great start, but I’d also love to see more movement toward broad-based change that touches entire departments. To make that happen, we would have to see strong advocacy for curricular change and the acceptance of new modes of scholarship for credit and degrees. This kind of change is happening, but it’s happening very slowly.

For digital and other non-traditional work to be recognized as scholarship, universities need examples of existing work to point to. Importantly, the site highlights the research products that the students are generating through the course of the programs. They often look quite different from the typical seminar paper, and demonstrate not only rigorous scholarly work, but also a creativity and vibrancy not often found in standard papers.

Highlighting this kind of work is aligned with the efforts of organizations like the Modern Language Association, which establishes guidelines and offers workshops on the evaluation of digital work for tenure and promotion.

The site then focuses on the people that are the core of each program. Every single program is characterized by strong, dedicated leaders and curious, intelligent students, and is invariably colored by the interactions among them. This can be both an asset and a challenge, as programs that rest on the shoulders of just a few individuals need to think about questions of continuity. But creating something new requires risk-taking, which is often easier for an individual or small group than for an entire department.

Resources may feel like one of the most significant barriers to implementing programs of this nature, so we’ve detailed the support structure of each. Money is a crucial aspect of this: some programs are grant-funded, of course, while others have hard budget lines within their institutions. Physical space and personnel are also key resources, and play an important role in the scope of the program.

A program’s future goals depend on a combination of many of the factors above. In some cases, the programs hope to grow, either within their institution or by forming cross-institutional partnerships. In other cases, however, the program’s success depends on its smallness, so some do not wish to expand, but rather intend to focus on how to continue innovating while staying light-weight.

And finally, the nuts and bolts of the programs. If you’re thinking of developing something like what you see on the site, the information in this section will help you to know some key questions, potential risks, and other things to keep in mind as you consider how to proceed.

I think of each program in the Praxis Network as an instantiation of the kinds of innovative solutions that can alleviate the issues that the survey uncovered. Humanities programs have the opportunity to better serve their students as well as the public by really examining what our core values are, and rethinking the methods we use to teach them. The Praxis Network programs show just a few possible ways to move toward collaborative projects, public engagement, and embracing an ethos of openness and exploration.

Praxis Network members will be meeting during the coming months to discuss what kinds of cross-institutional collaborations might be most effective. At the same time, SCI will convene meetings in conjunction with CHCI (the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes) and centerNet, its digital counterpart, to further explore points of intervention and to develop potential pilot programs that could leverage the particular strengths of traditional and digital humanities centers.

So, those programs are great examples to follow, but you might be wondering what you can do right now, especially if you’re a graduate student.

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First, if you’re not getting the information you need from your program, seek it out. If nothing else, start with the resources that are available on my website.

Second, connect with people. Browse #Alt-Academy and the database that I mentioned earlier. Find people that are doing interesting work and see if they’d be willing to talk with you about how they got there—many of us are, especially since our own paths were so often not what we expected them to be! Encourage your department to help set up mentorships with alumni from the department, or with scholar-practitioners working in the university. Engage in online networks that are relevant to your interests. Find a mentor that can support you.

Third, think about the skills and experience that you already have, how you might frame it for different kinds of jobs, and what else you might need to be a competitive applicant for positions that interest you. Depending on your circumstances, you might carefully consider whether to take an external job for a year of your graduate program rather than work as a TA if you have limited job experience outside of teaching.

Finally, there are lightweight training opportunities that you can pursue even if your home department is quite traditional. The Digital Humanities Summer and Winter Institutes are great examples of short programs that enable students (or faculty, staff, or anyone else) to pick up new skills while also building a strong network.

Beyond what I’ve talked about here, so much more is possible within and across existing programs. SCI hopes that our current work will help begin to rise the tide of transparency and innovation more broadly.

I am thrilled to announce the launch of the Praxis Network, a new partnership of graduate and undergraduate programs that emphasize innovative models of methodological training and collaborative research. I see the Praxis Network as a counterpart to the survey work that I’ve been doing—an illustration of a few of the kinds of programs that are making effective interventions in the traditional models of humanities pedagogy and research and preparing their students for a wider range of careers. The goals of each unique program are student-focused, digitally-inflected, interdisciplinary, and frequently oriented around collaborative projects.

Read all about it on the Scholars’ Lab site.

[Update: Cross-posted on the Scholars’ Lab blog]

I’ve just returned from two thought-provoking days of conversations about assessment and authority in new modes of scholarly production, the second in a series of three SCI meetings on the topic. We’ll synthesize the key outcomes and insights into a report very soon. For the moment, though, I want to think a little more about a question that occurred to me after the meeting: What is the place of beauty in academic writing? While this wasn’t something the group discussed directly, it did seem to be an undertone of certain threads of conversation.

I got home from CHNM on Friday evening feeling pretty brain-dead from the hybrid (and quintessentially #altac) work of wrangling meeting logistics and absorbing stimulating and thoughtful discussion. Ready to relax, I sat down to watch Pina and was entranced within minutes; the film is stunning. The clips of Pina Bausch’s dance company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, are mesmerizing; they are made even more compelling by Wim Wenders’ directorial work. Something about the visual beauty of the film and the dance it portrayed helped me to think about the preceding conversations about scholarly work in a new light.

One topic of discussion at SCI was the significance of the editorial process to the perceived quality and authority of scholarly work. Thinking about this while watching the film, I was struck first of all by the interviews with individual dancers that fill a substantial portion of screentime. Each dancer speaks admiringly of Pina (always referring to her by her first name), many of them noting her ability to draw out astonishing performances through her perceptiveness and laconic guidance. The task of ferreting out talent in academic spheres can happen at many different junctures, and is the touchstone of good mentors (and editors) everywhere. But I’m not sure that we give enough credit to the role, as stories of scholarly enterprise often favor a notion of individual struggle and success. Pina’s influence, by contrast, is clearly credited as a guiding force and catalyst, both for individuals and for the company as a whole.

The second thing that I thought about while watching the compelling visual display was the necessity of expertise and practice in the dance productions, no matter how unlike traditional repertoire they may have been. Pina’s company was known for innovative and risky works that departed significantly from traditional dance productions, but that doesn’t mean that the dances are sloppy or unrehearsed. On the contrary, it is clear that the dancers have a deep foundation in traditional training, that the unusual choreography is equally demanding of precision, and that the productions are meticulously rehearsed. The result is both beautiful and powerful.

As we talk about new modes of scholarly production that depart from the traditional mechanisms of academic authority, it’s worth considering what careful research and new lines of inquiry look like when separated from the formats that have long been customary. As the velocity of publication increases (and is done on an ever-thinner shoestring, even at traditional presses), the editorial process is condensed. Writers may not polish their prose to the same degree, and the work may not benefit from thorough content refinement, copyediting, or layout decisions that publishers have historically taken on.

Generally speaking, I think that making scholarly work public more quickly is a significant enough benefit that it can bear the risk of a few rough edges. At the same time, perhaps especially for literary scholars whose work revolves around the ways that words are put together into sentences and stories to create both meaning and beauty, I’m acutely aware of the power of a beautifully-written text. The care and precision with which we construct our arguments is, I think, directly related to the ideas that we express. It’s useful to think about written style in terms of code, too, in which syntax and precision are strictly necessary to create a functioning program. Someone might prefer the flexibility of Perl or the comparative strictness of Python or C, but once she has chosen a language for the program, the corresponding rules must be followed. Precision isn’t an aesthetic choice in this case, but a requirement for functionality.

All of this brings me back to my initial question: What is the place of beauty in scholarly writing? In a Twitter conversation with Kari Kraus, I floated three possibilities: It may be a core value to our scholarly enterprise; it may be a pleasant ancillary; or it may be a risky distraction.

I haven’t yet mentioned the risk factor, but it’s part of what initiated this line of thinking in the first place. Scholarly writing is, at its core, about the creation and dissemination of new knowledge; if that is the goal, then perhaps the packaging shouldn’t matter. Jason Priem, co-founder of ImpactStory and a participant at the SCI meeting, worried that too much emphasis on polished grammar or design could serve as a choke point, preventing innovative ideas and arguments from reaching an audience. Scrutinizing the surface of the work, Jason argued, means that only those who have learned the codes afforded by elite education will see their work accepted as valuable, which potentially reinforces problematic classist limitations on the creation of new knowledge and lines of inquiry.

The risk that Kari and I mentioned in our conversation considers a somewhat different angle. Rather than focusing on the rejection of good ideas that lack polish, we mused about the potential acceptance of weak arguments couched in beautiful prose. While I don’t think that this is an especially common problem in academic writing—I would love it if our problem was an excess of gorgeous prose!—it is plausible enough that it makes me pause when I think about whether beautiful writing could be considered a core value of scholarly work in the humanities.

Ultimately, I think that beautiful writing is akin to precise, well-rehearsed movements in dance. The movements themselves are not sufficient to establish an interesting, cohesive work, but they are both elements of the piece’s beauty, and signposts indicating the care and work that are its foundation. The same is true with stylistic precision or fine visual design: they not only affect the audience’s encounter with the work, but also suggest the hard work and craftsmanship that have gone into it. Admittedly, that would mean that beauty is one part substance and one part signal, and I think there’s a fear that signals are mere dissimulation. But we’re affected by signals all the time, whether they are intended or not, and so we might as well be aware of the ways those signals are created and received.

But what about the realities of contemporary scholarly production, in which editorial oversight and refinement are increasingly unavailable to scholars wishing to share their work as widely as possible? This is where a dose of cautious optimism comes in. As I’ve watched the innovative models of SCI’s partner projects—PressForward, MLACommons, and Scalar—I am hopeful that scholars will have more and more ways to participate in ongoing conversations about their work that lead to increased refinement. Post-publication review mechanisms, whether in the form of CommentPress or the multi-layered curation and editing of Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities, provide (arguably) richer opportunities for a scholar to work through ideas with input from a community of peers. The resulting work has the potential to be of higher quality than an article seen by only a few sets of eyes before its publication, and it is also likely to reach a wider and more diverse audience.

In the end, to recycle my own tweet, I just want to read (and, ideally, produce) more beautifully-written work. I hope that we’re creating systems that make that possible, and cultivating values that reward it.

[Cross-posted at the Scholars’ Lab blog]

This spring marks a new phase for my work with SCI. Data collection for the survey on career paths is complete, and analysis is underway, meaning that the next step will be much more focused on sharing outcomes. In some ways, this is a less comfortable step in the process for me (nerves! public speaking!), but also an exciting and satisfying one.

I’m honored to be giving several invited talks over the next few months:

• March 8, 12:30–2:30 p.m., NYU (hosted by the Humanities Initiative; here’s a poster [PDF])
• April 10, 5–6:30 p.m., University of Delaware (hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center; here’s a flyer [PDF])
• April 17, 12–1 p.m., Stanford University (hosted by the Humanities Education Focal Group, which Russell Berman chairs)

All talks are open to the public, so please come if you’re in the area! I’d love to see friendly faces, and I’m very much hoping for dynamic discussion at each event.

Also in the spirit of sharing information and outcomes, I’ve been working with Jeremy Boggs on a website that will showcase a small handful of innovative programs for humanities graduate and undergraduate students. I can’t wait to unveil it; the programs are exciting, the website is beautiful, and overall I think it will be very useful for a range of audiences. In particular, I hope that it can be used to support the development of other new programs with similar goals of equipping humanities scholars to excel in the paths that they choose. The site is designed to be something of a response to the survey results—where the survey underscores opportunities for improvement in graduate curricula, the site (called the Praxis Network) points to specific efforts to rethink methodological training with an eye toward collaboration, project-driven scholarship, and public engagement.

Finally, I’m incredibly pleased to be presenting a long paper at DH2013 in July that will include elements of the survey as well as the Praxis Network, and I’m working on a final report to be published around the same time. We’ll also publish the data so that others can build on the research we’ve done in the past year.

It seems crazy, but by the time the DH conference rolls around, my time at SCI will be nearly finished. I’m thrilled that I’ll have so many opportunities to share our work between now and then.

[Updated March 19 with link to Stanford talk]

I am delighted to announce that, following my term with the Scholarly Communication Institute, I’ll be joining the Modern Language Association as Managing Editor of the MLA Commons.

The new role begins in September, which seems far away, but the months will undoubtedly fly by. I’m in the enviable position of wanting to linger in my current position while also looking forward to the next. As many of you know, my position with SCI came with an expiration date; like many grant-funded jobs, this one runs out when the grant concludes. Were that not the case, I would have loved to keep working with Bethany Nowviskie and the team at the Scholars’ Lab; it is a wonderful place, with brilliant colleagues, smart, creative graduate students, and a constant stream of new ideas. It has been a privilege to work with them; I’ve learned an incredible amount in the past year, and the people at the Scholars’ Lab are a big reason why.

But if I do have to move along, I cannot think of a better place to land than working with Kathleen Fitzpatrick at the MLA. (I know, I’m incredibly lucky to have such phenomenal bosses and mentors.) I’ll be responsible for much of the editorial work and community building related to the brand-new MLA Commons. So please, start using it now if you haven’t already, so that I have a wealth of material to work with when I come on board! As you might imagine, I’ll be thinking a lot about how the Commons might best serve not only its existing active members, but also people in alternative academic careers. I’ll also be thinking about the potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration as the Commons matures.

Between now and September, I have a lot of work to do: I am continuing to work on the analysis and reporting of SCI’s recent survey on career preparation for humanities scholars; SCI is convening one more meeting on each of our two main topics (new models of scholarly production and reforming humanities graduate education); and we’re starting to think about future directions for the newly-launched Praxis Network. Watch for more on all of those things in the months ahead. In addition, I’ll have a couple of fun “firsts”: I’ll be attending DHSI (for a course on visual design! I’m terribly excited) and giving a long paper at my first Digital Humanities conference (here’s the program, hot off the presses). It’s an exciting time for me; I never could have predicted any of this a couple of years ago, and I’m looking forward to seeing what unfolds down the road.

Cross-posted on the Scholars’ Lab blog.

I gave the following talk at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston as part of an excellent roundtable organized by Paul Fyfe, who has also collected a number of resources in a Zotero library. The wide-ranging presentations sparked many thoughtful questions that I hope will lead to continued discussion about the ways that graduate training could be modified for the good of students, the discipline, and the public. Some of the slides are taken from my earlier presentation on SCI’s survey on career paths for humanities PhDs (a full report of which will be available later this year).

I’d like to take a step back from the question of how to reboot graduate training, and think instead about why we need significant change. Lately, some long-standing issues in higher ed, such as employment rates for PhD holders, seem to be receiving renewed attention that will hopefully set the stage for broad-based action. Some of these recent developments and articles include:

• The report on the 2011 Survey of Earned Doctorates, which presented the grim fact that 43% of doctoral recipients have no job or postdoctoral plan upon receiving their degree;
• A proposal at Stanford, designed by past MLA President Russell Berman and other faculty members, to dramatically reduce time to degree and to reform many aspects of humanities education; and
• Current MLA President Michael Bérubé’s talk at the Council of Graduate Schools’ annual meeting, in which he discussed the critical importance of reforming graduate training.

Note: I’ve written about the items above in more detail in a recent ProfHacker post. The post includes a broader range of links to other write-ups on these topics.

There are numerous other examples of ongoing work of this nature, such as the MLA’s Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature, which hosted an excellent discussion on the topic at the convention.

These conversations help to amplify current work being done by a number of individuals and organizations, at the Scholarly Communication Institute and elsewhere. My work with SCI has been deeply informed by the essays at #Alt-Academy, for instance, an open-access publication of Media Commons that explores the many issues related to the sometimes tense relationship between scholarship and professional directions. Of course, I’m also indebted to the extraordinary work and people of the Scholars’ Lab, which has housed SCI for the past few years.

Over the past several months, SCI has embarked on a study of career preparation among humanities scholars working in alternative academic careers, and we are also developing a network of innovative humanities programs to highlight possibilities for reform (more on that in a moment).

The goal of SCI’s study was to move from anecdote to data in the conversation about alternative academic careers. All of us know stories of the victories and challenges of pursuing an intellectually stimulating career beyond the tenure track, but there was little data to back up the narratives.

With that in mind, the study had two main phases. The first phase, which was public and exploratory, involved creating a public database where people comfortable enough to publicly identify as “alt-ac” practitioners could add themselves to a loose community of peers. The second phase of the study consisted of two confidential surveys.

We built the study within the framework of the #Alt-Academy project in part to leverage the energy of existing conversations. While “alt-ac” isn’t a crisply defined term, many people have found it to be an incredibly useful umbrella under which they could gather to talk about the kinds of satisfying careers that can be found outside the professoriate.

Trends among the nearly 800 responses we received to the main survey reveal a strong misalignment between the expectations of graduate students and the realities that they face upon completing their program.

As may be expected, a large majority of students enter graduate school expecting to pursue careers as professors—a total of 74%. What is perhaps more interesting is their level of confidence: of that 74%, 80% report feeling fairly certain or completely certain that this was the career they would pursue. Keep in mind that the survey respondents are all working outside the tenure track.

These expectations are not at all aligned with the current realities of the academic job market, as we know, and the urgency of finding a remedy to the lack of transparency is compounded by the rising amounts of student debt that burden so many graduates.

Deepening the problem, students report receiving little or no preparation for careers outside the professoriate, even though we’re at a moment when the need for information about a variety of careers is most acute.

Only 18% reported feeling satisfied or very satisfied with the preparation they received for alternative academic careers. The responses are rooted in perception, so there may be resources available that students are not taking advantage of—but whatever the reason, they do not feel that they are being adequately prepared. Again, this probably comes as no surprise, but it does reveal that we have significant room for improvement.

To give you a small taste of perspectives on the other side of the employment equation, here are some of the kinds of things employers indicate they would like to see:

Some specific skills come up frequently, including project management, the ability to work with and manage people, and written and verbal communication with a variety of audiences. Beyond that, employers mention a number of broader aptitudes, like a commitment to public engagement and an ability to adjust to the culture of different types of workplaces.

The good news is that all of the elements that employers seek would also be hugely beneficial for those grads that do go on to become professors. By rethinking their curricula in such a way that students gain experience in things like collaborative project development and public engagement, departments would be strengthening their students regardless of the path they choose to take.

UVa’s Praxis Program is designed as one of several new initiatives that help to assess needs and opportunities, develop and articulate new models, and foster the growth of collaborative networks among relevant institutions and individuals.

To help showcase strong models of reform, SCI is now developing the Praxis Network: a network of several existing programs that have developed innovative models of methodological training along the lines of the Praxis Program at UVa.

We anticipate that many programs that want to make changes will want to look to existing models for guidance, and by highlighting a handful of differently-inflected programs, we can bring together some patterns among them, while also underscoring the unique idiosyncrasies of each. In addition to sharing information with the public, we hope that the network will enable increased possibilities for communication and collaboration among the participants of each program.

One thing seems clear: the persistent myth that there’s nothing but a single academic job market available to graduates is damaging, and extricating graduate education from the expectation of tenure-track employment has the potential to benefit students, institutions, and the health of the humanities more broadly.

However, as long as norms are reinforced within departments—by faculty and students both—it will be difficult for any change to be effective.

Low tenure-track employment rates are not a new problem, but as the survey responses show, departments by and large are not succeeding at providing accurate and realistic information to their students.

For change to be possible, it’s essential that institutional norms and measures of prestige shift in favor of highlighting successful outcomes across a broader spectrum of possibilities. SCI hopes that our current work will help begin to rise the tide of transparency and innovation.

When I look back on 2012, I have no doubt that it will stick in my memory as a year of renewal. It has been an incredible and enriching year in so many ways, from a new home to a new job to what feels like a thousand and one new skills (many of them half-baked, but good starts nonetheless). I know that the tech skills below are no big deal for most everyone in the DH community, but I came to them all from total unfamiliarity.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the past year:

• I learned how (and why) to use the command line.
• I learned how to use Github, both for my own projects and to collaborate with others.
• I learned how to use vim, and that using vim makes me feel pretty badass… or else it makes me feel like a hopeless case. The line between the two feelings is pretty thin.
• I learned that everybody has to look stuff up in the documentation, and that half the battle is knowing where to look.
• I’ve gotten pretty decent with HTML markup.
• I can figure stuff out in CSS. Sometimes.
• Along the same lines, I finally figured out how to get a domain name and host, get a proper WordPress install, set up a child theme, and start making my website look the way I want it to look.
• I learned how to use an FTP client, and eventually I got brave enough to move remote files around from the command line.
• I learned enough JavaScript to piece some D3 visualizations together (though not really enough to get myself out of trouble).
• I learned a tiny little bit of Ruby.
• I learned how to type curly quotes, and why it matters (thanks, @clioweb!).
• And finally, it might rank low on the list of essential life skills, but I have learned to do a headstand without a wall to catch me, and that feels amazing.

It pleases me immensely that my spouse now comes to me when he’s thinking about web development issues—not because I really know what I’m doing, but because I’ve come to have a pretty decent framework for understanding how things work (or should work), even if I can’t put them together myself.

When I look back at some of my goals over the past few years, two things are very clear: First, I haven’t accomplished all of them, nor will I. (E.g., 2010, “Revise dissertation into a book manuscript.” Nope.) But second, and more importantly, I couldn’t have articulated goals that led in a straight line to where I am now, and in many ways I underestimated myself. It takes a lot of the pressure off to know that my path is always shifting, and that being flexible doesn’t necessarily mean I’m sacrificing something—sometimes it means I’m making room for something bigger.

The last couple of weeks have seen a great deal of news and conversation about graduate education reform. I have a lot to say about it (unsurprisingly!); you can find my take on it over at ProfHacker. The piece includes some discussion of SCI’s latest work, the Praxis Program, and the budding Praxis Network, so I hope you’ll take a look!

I’m also happy to note that I’ll be talking more about all of this at the upcoming MLA Convention in Boston—if you’re interested the topic, consider attending this roundtable on Rebooting Graduate Training. There will be ample time for discussion at the session, so come ready with questions and ideas.

I gave the following presentation at SCI’s recent meeting on rethinking graduate education. It was the first time I’ve publicly discussed results from the study on career preparation in humanities graduate programs that I’ve mentioned previously in this space. I was honored to discuss the topic with our extremely knowledgeable group of participants, and the thoughtful questions and comments that the talk generated will inform my thinking as I work toward a more formal report and analysis. I would welcome additional comments and questions.

A PDF of the presentation is also available, and has been cross-posted to SCI’s website and the Scholars’ Lab site.

I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to present some of the early findings from the Scholarly Communication Institute’s recent study on perceptions of career preparation in humanities graduate programs.

The impetus for this study came from recommendations made at SCI’s ninth summer meeting in 2011, where rethinking graduate education emerged as one of the critical priorities for the current humanities landscape. The study complements the series of meetings SCI is hosting this year and next, of which this meeting is the first. The primary goal of the study is to move from anecdote to data in the conversation about alternative academic careers and career preparation, in hopes of providing a body of data that can help support programs wishing to modify their graduate curricula. 

We finished collecting data at the beginning of October, so the analysis is not complete, but already raises some provocative questions.

We were very pleased with the number of responses that we received. At the same time, the response rate also highlighted an important discrepancy.

The study included two surveys. The primary survey targeted people with advanced humanities degrees who self-identify as working in alternative academic careers. (A somewhat loose definition, to be sure — I’ll discuss our methodology in a moment.) A second, shorter survey targeted employers that oversee one or more employees with advanced humanities degrees.

We set an initial goal of 200 responses on the main survey, and 100 on the employer survey. We were blown away by the responses to the main survey, which totaled nearly 800 when we closed it, for almost four times our goal. The employer survey, however, attracted far fewer responses, totaling around 80. This is a significant finding in itself, as it shows a pronounced disconnect between the motivations of job seekers compared to employers. Any recommendations SCI makes must keep this discrepancy in mind.

I’d like to jump straight into some of our findings, many of which will not come as a surprise — but again, the goal was to get numbers to back up the general sense that many of us have about these questions.

First, a large majority of students enter graduate school expecting to pursue careers as professors — a total of 74%. What is perhaps more interesting is their level of confidence: of that 74%, 80% report feeling fairly certain or completely certain that this was the career they would pursue. These expectations are not at all aligned with the current realities of the academic job market.

What this signals to me is that we are failing at bringing informed students into the system. This raises a few questions:

–First, whose responsibility is it to help incoming students understand their postgraduate options? This is a bit outside of the scope of this particular meeting, but it becomes our concern when students enter without the knowledge that they need.
–Second, what is the role of faculty and advisors relative to uninformed students?
–Third, and more speculative, should post-graduate planning play into admissions in any way? Is there an ethical responsibility here, especially considered in conjunction with increasing student debt? Put differently, should departments be admitting students — particularly if funding is limited or unavailable — if they do not understand their post-graduate options?

Deepening the problem, students report receiving little or no preparation for careers outside the professoriate, even though we’re at a moment when the need for information about a variety of careers is most acute.

Only 18% reported feeling satisfied or very satisfied with the preparation they received for alternative academic careers. The responses are rooted in perception, so there may be resources available that students are not taking advantage of — but whatever the reason, the bottom line is that students do not feel that they are being adequately prepared. Again, this probably comes as no surprise, but we have significant room for improvement.

This raises additional questions:

–Are faculty adequately prepared to provide the kinds of advice that students need?
–Should they be?
–If it’s not the faculty’s role, then whose role is it? Perhaps alumni or third-party service providers could fill the gap; if so, what are the trade-offs of outsourcing these kinds of preparatory roles to organizations or individuals outside of departments?

Along with questions that asked people to choose from pre-selected options, we also included a number of open-ended questions. The survey tapped into what can be an intensely emotional topic, and the wide range of responses we received suggests that people felt comfortable being candid.

The variety of emotions expressed in open-ended responses varied from optimistic and happy, to bitter and resentful. Many people report feeling betrayed.

Below is another sampling of the kinds of responses we received in the open-ended questions. We’ll be doing more systematic analysis of these responses in the weeks ahead, but for the time being, this will give you an idea of the kinds of reactions and reflections that our respondents provided.

We received a wide range of practical suggestions, too, such as offering more one-off workshops; including short credit or non-credit courses; and connecting students with alumni working in varied positions. It’s worth noting that while many were skeptical about even the possibility of creating a meaningful cultural change, they emphasized that for sustainable change to occur at all, it is important that it comes from within existing structures if it is to be perceived as valid.

One thing seems clear: the persistent myth that there is nothing but a single academic job market available to graduates is damaging, and extricating graduate education from the expectation of tenure-track employment has the potential to benefit students, institutions, and the health of the humanities more broadly. However, as long as norms are reinforced within departments — by faculty and students both — it will be difficult for any change to be effective.

Low tenure-track employment rates are not a new problem, but as the responses on the previous slides show, departments are not succeeding at providing accurate and realistic information to their students.

Perceived reputational risk is a significant roadblock to increased transparency regarding post-graduate career paths. A common refrain among the respondents was a call to collect and publicize employment data. However, departments have little incentive to collect this information, and even less motivation to make it public, especially if they think it makes them appear unfavorable relative to peer departments.

Are departments the only groups who can collect this kind of information? If they are, how can we change the incentives such that departments find it advantageous to publicize all types of employment among their graduates?

Turning now to the employer survey: while we haven’t yet done rigorous analysis on the qualitative responses, I did want to give a taste of the kinds of things employers indicate they would like to see.

First, some specific skills come up frequently, including project management, the ability to work with and manage people, collaboration, and written and verbal communication with a variety of audiences.

In addition, employers mention a number of broader aptitudes, like a commitment to public engagement, general work experience outside of academia, and an ability to adjust to the culture of different types of workplaces. Many employers placed high value on these employees’ understanding of academic structures and environments, but in order to serve as the valuable cultural translators that they could be, employees with graduate training also need to be sensitive to the ways in which academic environments differ from other workplace cultures. For those that graduate without limited (or no) outside work experience, the gap can be very challenging to bridge.

While I’ve only scratched the surface of the study’s findings, I’d like to shift gears in order to highlight what we hope will be the first of many concrete actions to come of this study: the development of the Praxis Network.

This is a network of several existing programs that are focusing on innovative models of methodological training, along the lines of the Praxis Program at the University of Virginia. We anticipate that many programs that want to make changes will want to look to existing models for guidance, and by highlighting a handful of differently-inflected programs, we can bring together some patterns and commonalities among them, while also underscoring the unique idiosyncrasies of each — the strong individuals providing leadership; the particularities of an institution; the available infrastructure; the funding model; and so on. In addition to sharing information with the public, we hope that the network will enable increased possibilities for communication and collaboration among the participants of each program.

In addition to the Praxis Program, we are currently working with Ethan Watrall at the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative; Matt Gold with the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative; Claire Warwick and Melissa Terras at UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities; and Bill Pannapacker with the Hope College Mellon Scholars program. The participating programs may fluctuate somewhat, but the intention is to keep the network small — more as a showcase than a comprehensive directory.

I’d like to circle back briefly to discuss our methods. First, the study had two main phases: so far, I’ve focused on the second, confidential phase. The first phase was public.

In order to scope out the terrain of individuals to include in the survey, the first phase involved creating a public database where people comfortable enough to publicly identify as “alt-ac” practitioners could add their names to form a loose community of peers.

We built the database within the framework of the #alt-academy project in order to leverage the energy of existing conversations. “Alt-ac” may not be a perfect moniker, but it has created a space to talk about careers that are not quite what most people envision as academic careers (within the professoriate), but that are not completely outside the academic sphere, either. Many people have found it to be an incredibly useful umbrella term, and have used it to talk about the kinds of intellectually stimulating careers that can be found outside the professoriate.

We were pleased with the initial turnout, and found that people were engaging more deeply than expected. It’s worth noting that even though the database has been open for a much longer period of time than the survey was (and it remains open to new entries now), far fewer people participated in the public space than in the confidential survey space. To me, this suggests that there is still a sense of discomfort — and even shame — about having pursued a job outside the traditional pipeline.

Once we launched the surveys themselves, we used this public group as an initial body of potential respondents. Because we were working with an unknown population, our subsequent distribution focused on “opt-in” strategies—social media, word of mouth, listervs, and traditional media coverage. While this method has definite weaknesses, we hoped to learn something not only from the content of the responses, but from the number and type of respondents.

One reason this study was important because even though the topic is deeply connected with other persistent issues in higher education, there were significant gaps in the data available from previous studies.

One of the most closely aligned studies was completed just recently by the Council on Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service. The study, Pathways Through Graduate Schools and Into Careers, examines current and former graduate students’ career expectations, their awareness of career opportunities, and the actual career paths they pursued. However, the study focused on a broad range of disciplines, which means that it could not go into much depth on concerns that are particular to the humanities. Further, the data is unpublished, so at least at this point, it is not possible to disaggregate the humanities respondents from the STEM respondents.

A 1996 study by Maresi Nerad and Joseph Cerny at the University of Washington, PhDs Ten Years Later, focused on similarly relevant questions. However, the only humanities discipline represented in their data was English. In addition, the study excluded people who left their programs before completing the degree, and because so many people exit their programs if they decide not to pursue an academic career, we wanted to include their perspectives. Of course, the data is now more than 15 years old, and the cohort graduated more than 25 years ago, making it overdue for an updated look.

Finally, we will build off of information collected by broad surveys like the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which provides useful baseline demographics but limited depth.

The data from the study does have some significant limitations:

We had limited data to use as a foundation or control, as I just mentioned; we were working with a population with fuzzy boundaries; and we relied on self-identification and self-reporting. For all of these reasons, the results should be considered more exploratory than definitive, and the respondents cannot be considered a representative sample. We see this survey as an important initial step, and we hope others will build on it.

We still have a good deal of work ahead of us, and because we want this survey to be maximally useful to our partners in humanities centers and digital humanities centers, as well as the broader humanities ecosystem, I’d welcome input in a number of areas. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be engaging in deeper analysis of the data; we’ll be conducting follow-up interviews by phone and email with a number of participants who indicated their willingness to do so; and we’ll be continuing the conversation in more depth at subsequent SCI meetings. We’ll eventually be making recommendations based on the data analysis. Finally, we’ll be publishing a final report in partnership with the Council on Library and Information Resources, and we’ll also publish the data so that others can work with it.

As the discussion on rethinking methodological training continues, I hope you’ll keep this study in mind and share your thoughts with me on how it can best serve its audiences. Thank you!

References
Council of Graduate Schools. Pathways Through Graduate School and Into Careers. 2012. <http://pathwaysreport.org/>

“Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2010.” Based on data from the Survey of
Earned Doctorates. National Science Foundation, June 2012. <http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/>

Nerad, Maresi, and Joseph Cerny. “PhDs: Ten Years Later.” Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education, University of Washington; 1996. <http://depts.washington.edu/cirgeweb/c/research/phd-career-path-surveys/phds-ten-years-later/>

Nerad, Maresi, and Joseph Cerny. “From Rumors to Facts: Career Outcomes of English PhDs.” ADE bulletin 32.7 (1999): 11. <http://www.mla.org/bulletin_124043>

Photo Credits
Slide 1: “Pipeline” by stigwaage
Slide 7: “Pencils” by Elle *
Slide 11: “He Didn’t ‘Mind the Gap’” by Scott Smith
Slide 12: “Fenced In Part 2” by gomattolson

This year’s MLA Convention program is up, and I’m already excited about connecting with people and hearing about their latest work. I’m also feeling a little uneasy about my own presentation, though. Or rather, I wish I could belatedly add a second presentation that is rooted in my current work at SCI.

Proposals for MLA presentations are due early in the year; I submitted mine mid-March, and I think most deadlines fell around the same time. It’s an entirely reasonable time frame given the size and complexity of the convention, but it also means there’s a significant lag between submission and presentation. At that time, I was still at Sloan, though I knew (unofficially) that I’d be starting at SCI soon after. I knew that my work this year would have me digging deeply into the landscape of alternative academic careers, but I didn’t know enough of the specifics it would entail to write a proposal on it, and the study that has been my primary focus didn’t exist yet. So, because I knew I wanted to go to the MLA (and because I wanted to give myself some research and writing homework), I proposed a paper that was grounded in my academic background — one I had been wanting to write, and that I’ll be happy to present and get some feedback on.

But at the same time, I have so very much I want to talk about related to SCI’s recent study. We have all the data, and while I’m still analyzing it, the MLA would be *such* a great place to talk about preliminary results and their significance. There are a number of great panels on alt-ac careers, on rethinking graduate education and the dissertation, and several others in the same vein, which I am simply delighted to see. I so want to contribute to what will be excellent and stimulating conversations — but I just couldn’t have predicted what I would want to say when proposals were due.

Another bind is that by the following convention, January 2014, I’ll no longer be at SCI — and I don’t know where I’ll be instead, or what exactly my work will focus on. It probably won’t make sense to present on the study at that point anyway, because by then the final report will be published. But then I fear I’ll fall into the same difficulty — I simply won’t know what I’ll be able to present the subsequent year. It makes me worry about when my work and scholarship will sync up with my public presentation of it, which is probably a feeling that others in short-term employment situations are well familiar with.

In the end, it’s not a big thing; I’ll participate in other ways, from questions at the scheduled sessions to informal conversations with people who are interested, and I’ll get word out about the survey results in other ways. But I think the feeling of disconnect might be hard to shake.