We Need to Talk about the Digital Humanities Job

This is not a commentary on the definition, legitimacy, or future of digital humanities (DH) – there is already enough of that around. Rather, it is a treatment of one of the field’s most significant yet elided aspects – jobs. Not just any job, not the tenure-track professorship wherein digital humanities is combined with an established discipline like literary studies or history; this is an exploration of ‘the DH job’. I refer to positions largely considered to be ‘alt-ac’ designed to support the development of DH within a particular institution. This is both a matter of pragmatics and ethics: the extent to which such roles align with existing frameworks needs to be fully appreciated if they are to benefit higher education, and we shouldn’t be putting people in these positions until we’ve answered such questions