charting my archive

Posted on May 4, 2013 by ctb — Leave a comment ↓

I have a very short hiatus between the end of the Spring Semester and the onset of a May Term, during which I’ll be teaching a three-week course on the Spanish Conquest. (As an aside, I’m hoping in that May term to finally pull off having students build a text adventure game, or games, on the course subject.)

During this break, I’ve been grinding through neglected inventories of cases that form the archival core of my current work on popular sexuality in the Spanish Empire. These cases are drawn from the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador (ANE), and are drawn from the Criminales, Civiles, Matrimoniales, Residencias, Fondo Especial, Prisiones, and assorted other Series from the ANE. The most important of the cases are from the Serie Criminales, of which my case set counts some 900 of about 3400 extant criminal cases from the colonial period. The Serie Criminal for the colonial period includes cases dating from 1589-1820, though through the middle decades of the 17th century, there are very few surviving cases. Of the 900 cases I’m using from the Serie Criminales, 333 are sex-related cases, in which the individuals being investigated are accused of sex-related acts. The other 600-odd cases relate to contextually interesting criminal prosecutions: 1. drunkenness; 2. domestic violence; 3. insults; 4. magistrate abuse of power; 5. gambling; 6. horse racing; 7. murder and assault; 8. etc.

I’ve chosen these cases in order to better understand the nature of sex-related prosecutions, and their potential for an ethnohistorical-like investigation of popular sexual norms. I decided in the process of putting together my inventories of cases to keep track of the relative frequencies of sex-related prosecutions in the criminal archive. I then plotted these frequencies across boxes and years. As with many archives, the ANE Serie Criminales is divided into numbered boxes (cajas) full of individual cases folders (expedientes). It is impossible to draw too many conclusions from the cases that have been preserved over the centuries because we have no way of knowing what’s behind the particular preservations. Was part of the archive damaged or destroyed in a previous age? Were some magistrates or notaries better or worse at collecting, preserving, and passing on their files? Likewise, we have no cases from the first 20 years of Quito’s existence as an Audiencia, and only a smattering into the early 18th century.

Nonetheless, charting the cases in my archive does show some interesting trends. So, two charts for you. (Click on each chart to get much larger images.)

1. Total and Selected Cases, 1601-1820:

This chart includes both raw counts and rolling 15-year averages of case counts for the total Serie Criminales and my 900-case subset. It’s divided by archival box, rather than by case year– which gives an impression of a much more consistent archive size over the years. Note that there are two periods where my selection of cases deviates a bit from the total case trend line: 1. from around box 45-55; and, 2. from box 185 onward. Temporally speaking, boxes 45-55 correspond to the period roughly between 1755 and 1765, the early years of Charles III’s reign (1759-1788). Box 185 onward takes us from 1802-1820, through the end of colonial rule. (Ecuador officially became part of Gran Colombia in 1822, but I’ve truncated at 1820 for convenience only.) This was an era of liberal ascendance and crisis. That said, in the raw counts its visibly the case that cases I find interesting begin to decline in the Box 140s, or around 1790, which corresponds to the end of Charles III’s reign. I should have plotted this with a different trendline. Why a 15 year rolling average? I don’t know, it’s my own experience that 15 years might be a chunk of time that produces a sort-of epoch of prosecutorial priorities.

2. Total and Sex-Related Cases by Year, 1601-1820:

Here I’ve changed the x-axis from box to year, and plotted only sex-related cases. It’s much more obvious in this chart that the Serie Criminal is really an archive of the 18th century. The first real uptick in cases begins around 1722, the second around 1743, and the big explosion amps up in 1779. By the way, the second peak corresponds to the first decade of the 19th century. I’ve also included 4-year rolling averages in this chart. Sex-related prosecutions peak in the same general time frame as overall prosecutions peak, but their percentages are anomalously high. As a percentage, sex-related prosecutions peaked in 1788 as 27% of the extant criminal cases in the Serie Criminales. This comports with jail censuses.

You’ll note there is a little bump in the trendline for Sex-Related cases earlier in the 18th century. Right around 1745, when for a cluster of a few years those cases again reached into the 20% range of total cases. What do the 1740s and the 1780s have in common? Well, for one thing they have periods of epidemic disease and natural disaster in common. Could natural disorder account for a rise in sex-related prosecutions, when a reformist government might be interested in making order?

The devil in that question is in the details, and it’s interesting to note that prior to the 1780s, sex-related prosecutions were dominated by instances of forced rape, incest, and cases involving young women. In the 1780s, cases are dominated by descriptions like illicit relationship, concubinage, and adultery. This suggests the state takes a very different interest in sex acts at the point that prosecutions dramatically increase.

What am I doing with these cases?

This project has evolved over time. What I’m actually interested in is both methodological and historical– understanding popular attitudes towards sex through prosecutions. So, I’m taking especially cases of concubinage and adultery and looking at a number of factors. How do magistrate and defendant portrayals of these relationships differ? How long did relationships last before they were brought before legal authorities? What were the circumstances that made relationships prosecutable– what accounted for their transition to notoriety? What I’m finding is that defendants use arguments from customary practice that are similar to legal defenses across the spectrum of criminal and civil litigation. I’m also finding that relationships were very frequently long-lived, often producing children and never drawing the attention of the state until something outside those relationships sparked a conflict. This could be violence, nightly patrols by judicial authorities, commercial disagreements, and any other number of conflicts that had little to do with sex and much to do with other aspects of neighborhood tranquility. What to make of that? The cases paint a picture of toleration without tolerance in popular sexual attitudes in the eighteenth century.

I’m also finding that as the 18th century wears on, the insults people hurl at one another become increasingly tied to racial terms, including those hurled at women. More and more, phrases like “(s)he treated my like a zamba/india” show up. But, that’s another post altogether.

Posted in Uncategorized

matplotlib on OSX Mountain Lion with virtualenv

Posted on April 19, 2013 by ctb — Leave a comment ↓

I have been struggling to get matplotlib working ever since upgrading to OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. It’s necessary for a number of different graphing/plotting things I want to do with NLTK and Pandas. It’s very frustrating. The solutions I’ve found for the kinds of problems I’ve been having don’t ever seem to work. (For example, here, here, here, and all these too.)

I want to get this working because, in part, I want to reproduce the lessons Matt Jockers presented on text analysis in R at the Digital Humanities Winter Institute.¹ The Python Data Analysis Library provides the kind of data structures needed to do the kind of analysis offered in R. At any rate, it brings me back to matplotlib again.

So, I have tried the prescribed solutions to the problem of installing in every imaginable combination– installing and uninstalling dependencies in different orders, to no avail. I was doing this using OS X’s built-in python, which with Mountain Lion is 2.7.2 and serves my purposes, generally.

I finally decided to try using a virtualenv, and magically matplotlib started working. So, here’s how I did it:

Using the package manager homebrew I installed libpng, freetype, and pkg-config.

$ brew install libpng freetype pkg-config
Using virutalenv and the truly awesome virtualenvwrapper to set up a fresh python instance just for this kind of text analysis.

$ mkvirtualenv text_analysis (text_analysis) $ pip install numpy (text_analysis) $ pip install scipy (text_analysis) $ pip install pandas (text_analysis) $ pip install nltk (text_analysis) $ pip install ipython (text_analysis) $ pip install tornado (text_analysis) $ pip install zmq

And then, finally,

(text_analysis) $ pip install matplotlib

The only package of those listed above that is required for matplotlib is numpy, but the others are useful for what I’m working on.

Whereas doing this exact same thing with Mac’s built-in python produced constant Import Errors, regardless of whether I installed matplotlib with pip, with another package installer, or building from source.

I’m glad to have it working again. If you’re having trouble getting matplotlib working, then try installing in a virtualenv, and by all means use virtualenvwrapper to manage your python envs. This may well require a change in your workflow, but it will be a change for the better. It’s good working practice to isolate your development environments, and better than sudo site package installs on your system python.

A couple of words on managing python environments:

To ensure your scripts will work with the activated env, make sure to use the correct shebang line at the top of the file:

#! /usr/bin/env python
As you get used to using envs, you may find a few standard sets of site packages you use again and again. pip allows you to install packages from a special requirements file. While working in an environment, such as my text_analysis environment, you simply use a pip freeze command:

(text_analysis) $ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Then, in a new env you simply bootstrap with pip:

(new_env) $ pip install -r path/to/requirements.txt

If you’re interested in using ipython or ipython notebooks, you’ll also need to install readline. The ipython folks recommend installing it with easy_install instead of pip, because it works better for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. The process is the same as above:

(text_analysis) $ easy_install readline

Finally, virtualenvwrapper makes it very easy to list site packages (lssitepackages), make new envs (mkvirtualenv), and list and switch between them (workon). For more, see the documentation linked above.

I just got Jocker’s new book in the mail just this week, and in reading it am being drawn back to the work we did in January. ↩

Tagged with: matplotlib, mountain lion, python
Posted in programming, Uncategorized

Posted on February 23, 2013 by ctb — Leave a comment ↓

Thinking about George Landow’s observation that,

One might claim to see a parallel between the dotcom bust and the general loss of academic standing by critical theory….

and

[Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and other critical theorists'] approach to textuality remains very helpful in understanding our experiece of hypermedia. And vice versa. *

in connection with my recent piece on long-form historical narrative. The context of these comments comes with Landow’s admission that poststructuralism waned in the academy, even as the read-write world of Web 2.0 exploded. He’s right in his contention that poststructuralists provide excellent analytical tools for understanding hypertext and the read-write web. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of Deluezian/Foucaultian emergence than the explosion of hypertextual writing in the post-dotcom era, materially manifest in the LAMP stack (linux, apache, mysql, php), and served to the world through the well-masked control of Protocol.

Historiography always maintained a tenuous relationship to poststructuralism. And the demise of the latter has been celebrated by many Historians if only in continued silence and a smug sense of having “correctly” ignored it all along.

Historians, to generalize to a ridiculous extent, simply struggle to incorporate theoretical challenges that simultaneously lack historicity AND that set out to undermine narrativity.

Which brings me back to my discontent with current options for long-form narrative online. Is my discontent related to the theoretical implications of hypertextuality itself?

*George Landow, Hypertext 3.0 (Johns Hopkins Press, 2006):xiv.

Posted in Digital History

assessment, accreditation, taxonomy: bloom’s picker!

Posted on February 19, 2013 by ctb — Leave a comment ↓

UT Knoxville is approaching its date with the destiny that is SACS re-accreditation. We’re due to submit our campus-wide application in September 2014. That means we’re getting in to full gear now for the hoop jumping that is this process. Today I got to attend an “Assessment Training” for program directors to introduce us to the language and form of assessment. I have a very jaded view on this. I suspect most faculty do.

The session began with a reminder that accountability in higher education has “increased over the past decade and accelerated with the recent recession.” Due to pressures from accreditation agencies, like SACS, as well as I’m sure tons of other interest groups, “we nee to transition to a culture of assessment.”

Cultivating a culture of assessment in Higher Education is, apparently, a new thing. All the forms of assessment that professors use with their students aren’t what we’re talking about here. That sort of assessment doesn’t ensure students, parents, and legislators that learning is happening. What will ensure it is choosing a set of learning goals, writing a rubric to assess them and the programmatic level, and then of course make changes based on the result. I love how agencies assume as an opening gambit that such things aren’t already happening, and assume such because the iterative process of education isn’t written in the correct formal language.

What is that formal language, you might ask? It’s a language that is shared amongst institutions undergoing the process. To write learning goals and assessments correctly, one can simply google sacs accreditation and look at materials institutions put up on the web. A “Culture of Assessment” is really about a “Language of Assessment.” It’s one of many newspeaks in operation on campus today, and together with MBA-Speak and associated corporatization-of-academia-speaks, I find it simultaneously vapid and invidious.

Assessment-speak, like corporatist language on the university, claims to promote efficiency and accountability. But how and to whom? Institutions facing SACS re-accreditation are encouraged to construct an elaborate set of learning objectives using verbs tied to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. That’s right, a significant portion of SACS approval hinges on the facade of a set of terms related to educational research published in 1956. The taxonomy is, of course, hierarchical and posits that students move to higher levels, from remembering to creating, as they learn more.

My experience is that students don’t move from lower to higher levels in a linear fashion, but rather iteratively and messily. Nonetheless, we get to write learning objectives that draw on the higher levels, and demonstrate movement to them. These are supposed to follow a particular form:

The student will verb object.

Despite the learning objectives drawing on the higher end of the taxonomy, they’re also supposed to be simple and measurable. I figure, the easiest way to do this, appropriate to the rigor of the process, is to automate it. So, as a service to history departments across the country facing regional accreditation, I present to you Bloom’s Picker, a simple web app that will write your learning goals for you. Just refresh the page. Three to five are usually sufficient!

The thing is, the sentences produced by the app almost always work and could be copy and pasted straight into an assessment rubric. This isn’t a commentary on the rigor of academic history. I’ll leave it to you on what it does measure.

Tagged with: assessment, bloom's taxonomy, higher ed, sacs
Posted in Uncategorized

a long form historical narrative framework

Posted on February 4, 2013 by ctb — 7 Comments ↓

Many, many events have come and gone without comment in the last two months on this blog. Significantly, in January I went to both the AHA in New Orleans and to the Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI) at the University of Maryland. On the former, there’s a post brewing particularly about a round table I was responsible for as Chair of the CLAH Teaching Committee. That, and the music and food in NOLA.

DHWI was as a very interesting experience. I took a class on large scale text analysis in R taught by UNL’s Matt Jockers. There was tons of code, and a learning curve for me in getting used to R’s data structures and syntax. I’ll admit I struggled a bit with visualizing in my head the various types of matrices that constitute much of R’s data structures. I have more to say about this class too, but in another post.

I drove each day to College Park from Baltimore together with Alex Galarza. Alex and I talked a lot sitting in traffic on I-95. At some point during the week we ended up in a discussion on something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last year or so– frameworks for long form (historical) narrative online. We both share some misgivings about many of the platforms currently in use in Digital History projects, including WordPress, Drupal, Omeka, KORA, etc.

I’m not a designer, and I think that I lack a vocabulary to explain exactly what my misgivings are about the current platforms and how they affect the potential for presenting long form historical argument. In the case of the platforms I listed above, in each case the idea of constructing a long form narrative on the platforms always feels like a hack. WordPress is a great platform for writing blog posts. It doesn’t take much, though, for an individual post to get to the tldr level. The UI of a blog sets limits, at least of expectation, on the length one will spend reading an individual piece. That’s not, of course, the condition of an Omeka or Drupal, both of which might be used in a blog-like manner, but which are intended at a more fundamental level as expressions of modeled relationships between entities that exist in their databases. The way that the elementary entities of the various CMSs are conceived affects the organization and delivery of information using that platform. Raf Alvarado gave an excellent talk on this very thing a few years ago at THATCamp Prime. I put up my notes from that session a few years ago, which was the best presentation I’ve ever heard of the connection between the ontology of a CMS and its resulting product. I bring it up here because I think that Raf’s idea about the way platforms (CMSs) model content has direct bearing on my own discomfort with them as current options for long form historical narrative.

Let’s take Omeka as an example. In Raf’s presentation he noted that for Omeka, the elementary unit is the ITEM. Items belong to Collections, and have Dublin Core metadata, keywords, and tags associated with them. Combinations of items, organized by membership in collections or linked through metadata, keywords, or tags allow information to be accessed through Exhibits. Raf described this, borrowing a term from Landow’s Hypertext, as “Axial Hypertext,” or a “sequential content model.” On the face of it, it may seem that a sequential content model would be the best for historical presentation, encouraging the reader to go through a sequence curated by the scholar through the construction of exhibits. Reading that sentence, I imagine you imagining a museum, which is appropriate given the genealogy of Omeka. But, it highlights what remains an unspoken divide in historical scholarship– between what is traditionally called “public” vs. academic history. The narrative of a public history exhibit, and that of an Omeka site as well, is intimately tied to Item objects. This isn’t the case in the kind of history I and most of the History professoriate write.

Long form narrative is not object oriented, to butcher a phrase associated with philosophy and computer programming. While historical writing is certainly evidentiary, it’s not a sequential presentation of evidential objects. Omeka doesn’t force one to parade objects, but it is predisposed to organizing information in that manner. I’m not trying to pick on Omeka either, because I have problems with all of the major platforms and the models they impose on the information-knowledge complex. They can also all be hacked for the purpose of long form historical narrative.

Why does this matter, even? We have epubs for tablet reading. Isn’t that the electronic substitute for the book? It is I guess, but it falls short for me for two reasons. 1. Epubs truly do cede design elements to the platform. 2. Epubs do little to utilize the interactivity made possible by hypertext. They’re an ugly simulacrum of the book. I also don’t like the movement of more and more information to apps, as opposed to on the open web. There isn’t too much I can think of about the epub experience that can’t be replicated on a well designed website that is by intention responsive to screen size and computer type.

This discussion cropped up on twitter a couple of weeks ago. Alex storified it. It was started by a query about allowing users to create their own narratives from archival collections. It’s a cool question, and one that is really similar to the idea behind Scalar or Scholars Lab’s plugin Neatline for Omeka.

I’m really less interested in existing or new platforms that can be coerced into long form historical narrative, especially those where evidence objects are the central focus of the platform’s “data object.” I’m more interested in general design principles for presenting either wide-ranging or deeply analytical historical work online. Digital History has focused more on the object of evidence, in part because of its roots in public history and in part because really the Web provided for the first time the capacity to share sources ubiquitously. As a result of that orientation, and with exceptions of course, DH has not offered much to historians working in a more academic mode. And that’s a shame. And that’s a shame that has affected the perception of DH in the traditional academy. If you doubt that, read the Introduction to Allan Megill’s *Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, which is essentially a scathing review of Valley of the Shadow. The problem, if it is one, is the extent to which Digital History has turned it’s practitioners into curators or archivists to the neglect of long-form narrative and analysis.

It’s my contention that part of that is platform driven. I’d like to call, instead, for an html/css/js framework for historical narrative. The success of a css framework like Twitter’s bootstrap is in part its platform independence. There has been a backlash against bootstrap, in part because of its success. And its success is rooted in providing a set of icons, css layouts, javascript ui that makes it easy for people without design chops to prototype a site quickly. I don’t, though, find bootstrap to be particularly readable for the kinds of sustained interaction historians are looking for. We’re not talking about web applications here, as much as a newly imagined book.

What would a framework for historical narrative include?

A minimalist interface.
Good typography that conveys the seriousness and temporality of the narrative. With today’s screen resolutions, I think we can go with serif fonts and large type. We’re not selling SAAS or any commodity, so why take our typographic cues from that world?
Navigation. Finding one’s place, and finding it again is important for scholarly reading. Together with navigation would be, I’d say, the ability to cite by paragraph. And, to be honest, I’m neither a fan of scrolling or pagination. But maybe that’s just me.
Javascript popups for footnotes/endnotes, and maybe for evidence objects as well. One of the things that hypertext has done to sustained reading is present a huge array of interesting and distracting linked elements. But, every time I leave a page to look at something, finding my way back and refocusing can be difficult. Better embedding would help this.
I’d really like some means to visualize embedded metadata/rdfa/microdata as well.

What else? What else would you want to see in such a framework? The upside of such a framework is it could be used with any platform, or by itself with book-length works written in Markdown. This isn’t exactly the direction the conversation on twitter was taking, but as Jeremy Boggs tweeted in the storified conversation:

@parezcoydigo @galarzaalex @anneperez @tjowens @wragge @miriamkp we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with good ol HTML & CSS

— Jeremy Boggs (@clioweb) January 23, 2013

With the ease of authoring with Markdown, I think he’s exactly right that there’s still much to explore with just HTML and CSS.

Tagged with: css, historical narrative, html, publishing, twitter bootstrap
Posted in Digital History

student post feed the hard way

Posted on February 2, 2013 by ctb — 2 Comments ↓

I decided for the Spring semester to write my course site using Flask, a python micro web framework. By saying it is a micro framework, I’m saying it doesn’t do near as much for you as Ruby on Rails and the like. I haven’t written a web app from scratch before, so I figured it would be a good exercise to do so for a course site, especially since I want to do something much more complex for next Fall’s Seminar on Digital History in Theory and Practice.

Flask is great, from my perspective, for a couple of reasons. 1. It’s in python. (I’m comfortable with python, so I don’t have to learn a bunch of new language conventions while also learning to build the web app.) 2. Even though as a microframework, Flask doesn’t handle a ton for you, there are already a bunch of extensions out there that help quite a bit.

The past two years or so, I’ve been building my course sites with hyde, a python static site generator much like ruby’s jekyll. I think that most of what we do with course sites can be done statically, with just a little client-side javascript. And, in fact, there is nothing on this new site that I couldn’t do that way.

So, why bother with Flask then? I don’t know. Shits and giggles? The chance to learn how to deploy a wsgi app on Dreamhost? Learning at a very basic level about routing views, app configs, etc. I still didn’t want to mess with a SQL database for the site, because other than tracking student posts there’s no point in it. Everything else my course sites need, at least for now, are better served as, essentially, static files.

So, individual pages for the site are all written in Markdown, and served using a flask extension named flat-pages. It’s a nifty plugin. When the app receives a url request, the path is checked against a folder named pages. So, for example, http://history475.chadblack.net/syllabus/ checks for a file named syllabus. Since it’s there, it takes the text of that file, which is still in Markdown, converts it to an html snippet and serves it through a page template. This is, in many ways, what a static site generator does, and what Frozen Flask does to produce static sites from a Flask app. (I’m going to do that when this course is over. There’s no need for an in-active site to be anything but a static site.)

This brings us back to a page of student post feeds. I require my students to each start a wordpress.com blog for my course. They write weekly, and I always have a place on the site that aggregates their feeds. There are many easy ways to do this. For my previous static sites, I’ve used a number of javascript options. For my personal site, I use feedjs for an up-to-date feed of this site. For course sites I’ve been using Google’s Feed API, which lets me embed a whole bunch of feeds into a singe frame. It’s also nice because Google caches feeds and lets you control a number of features. Sharon Leon is using a Google Reader bundle for The Digital Past, which is very nice given the ease of putting together and sharing bundles in Reader. I always actually track student posts for grading purposes that way.

But all of that is too easy. For my Flask site, I first put the feed retrieval directly in site logic with a function that checked feeds each time someone visited the student work page. By the way, I’m using a python package named feedparser for getting the feeds. This works. But, it’s also very slow and requires a whole bunch of resources to do retrieve things that are rarely updated. A better solution would be to store student feeds in an SQL, or even NoSQL database. But, I only want to show the most recent post on the site, so all the caching and checking, and then the overhead of adding an ORM to the app seemed like more trouble that it’s worth.

Solution? Why not write a script that gets the most recent post of a student site and have it directly write Markdown to a file in the pages directory? So, that’s what I did. I run the script with a cron job. Speaking of which, that’s another thing I learned doing this– how to write a crontab entry and deal with script path problems and the like.

feedparser returns a dictionary-like object that is fairly complex, so it took a bit of time figuring out where the elements of the feed were that I wanted to display. Then, I had encoding problems. Because Python 2.x always ends up in an encoding problem. feedparser returns unicode objects, and Python’s normal file writer tries to encode everything as ASCII.

The result is this page, which is essentially programmatically-written Markdown. All the code for the site is on github.

Next semester I’m teaching a grad/undergrad seminar on Digital History. That site will also be a Flask app, but this time I’m going to have students write posts directly on the site through an admin interface. Yes, I’m going to reinvent the blog, because doing it the hard way is better for me.

Tagged with: cron, flask, markdown, python
Posted in Uncategorized

not @mlajobs, no really

Posted on December 17, 2012 by ctb — Leave a comment ↓

Early this Fall, I wrote a few pieces about the scurrilous formalization of the expiring PhD. In the wake of the furor caused by the ad from Colorado State, and another from Harvard, much virtual ink was spilt, some of it quite funny.

This evening, a retweet originating with Brian Croxall came across my feed highlighting an ad that should have come from the mlajobs tumblr. But it didn’t. It’s real:

Penn State U, DuBois – Full-Time Non-TT Assistant Prof. of English (DH, Lit, & Composition) – INTERVIEWS SCHEDULEDEdit

Full-time Nontenure-Track Assistant Professor of English

Teach three courses (9 credits) in Digital Humanities, Literature, and Composition a semester using traditional and hybrid delivery modes. Publish in refereed journals. Participate in professional organizations and in course, curriculum, and program development. Stay current in pedagogy appropriate for discipline through scholarly activities. Advise students and provide career guidance. Participate in campus, university, and community service activities. Position may be renewable. MLA interviews. Qualifications: Ph.D. in English, with specialty in Digital Humanities and expertise in British or American Literature. Evidence of potential in scholarship and professional development is expected. Commitment to high-quality instruction in a student-centered environment is desired. Interest in the instructional use of technology is required; interest in active and collaborative learning is an advantage. Prior college-level teaching is preferred. Enthusiasm for teaching in a multidisciplinary environment is important. Applicants should include a list of links to their significant digital humanities work, with appropriate access information. Finalists will be contacted and asked to provide a list of references.

How offensive. Penn State Dubois wants to hire an English PhD, with a specialty in Digital Humanities and British or American Lit, who has published in refereed journals, who’s up on their pedagogy, and who will have to advise students, do service, and is expected to be active in program development. That’s the description of a tenure-track professor. But, is this job for a tenure-track professor? No, of course not. It’s for a lecturer whose contract “may be renewed.”

The level of experience this ad describes doesn’t even fit the bill for many new PhDs who haven’t yet had a tenure-track job.

Now, Penn State Dubois offers Associate Degrees, which I guess means it is as much a community college as an extension campus of PSU. And it may be that community colleges are more used to and more likely to hire off track. But, the description here is the that of an R2 or quality SLAC. What does PSU Dubois expect? Do they simply think that DH people are all into that #alt-ac thing, and so don’t need the promise of traditional academic promotion in return for a commitment to research, publication, and teaching? Or is it simply that PSU Dubois knows there’s a large enough pool of surplus academic labor that they can get away with this? Or is this ad written for an inside candidate? If its the latter, then shame on you for putting other people through the MLA job wringer. If its any other reason, then shame on you for helping undermine the profession.

Tagged with: job market, MLA, shame
Posted in Uncategorized

charting my archive

matplotlib on OSX Mountain Lion with virtualenv

assessment, accreditation, taxonomy: bloom’s picker!

a long form historical narrative framework

student post feed the hard way

not @mlajobs, no really

Penn State U, DuBois – Full-Time Non-TT Assistant Prof. of English (DH, Lit, & Composition) – INTERVIEWS SCHEDULEDEdit

Full-time Nontenure-Track Assistant Professor of English

Follow “parezco y digo”