Getting a job after your PhD: Strategies to imagine and build alternative academic careers

DHA 2014, Perth.

Given the realities of the competitive academic job market - why aren't more postgrads discussing hybrid and alternative career options?

Register today to attend a free workshop

We're running a free workshop on Tuesday, 18 March (9am - Midday) exploring strategies and tools to help PhD candidates and early career researchers imagine and build alternative academic careers.

What is an 'alternative academic' career?

#Altac careers have been described as off the tenure track, but within the academic orbit.  These positions are serviced by “hybrid humanities scholars” who work in a diverse range of institutions including universities, cultural heritage bodies, libraries, museums, academic publishing, and the public sector. Roles often include a combination of administration, project management, teaching and research work.

About the workshop

The workshop will include a panel session with several practicing “alt-academics”, hands-on activities and plenty of lively discussion and debate.

We’ll be asking questions such as:

• How can PhD students better locate their research and work in an employable context?
• How can PhD students prepare for alternative academic careers during and after their candidature?
• What are the main opportunities and challenges associated with alternative academic careers?

Who should attend this workshop?

Postgraduate students and early career researchers.

How do I register?

This workshop is free of charge however  registration is required. Numbers are limited so register online today!

(In the event that tickets are unavailable, please email johawkins@gmail.com to join a wait list.)

Get involved! Volunteer for DHA2014 (18-20 March)

2014 is looking to be action packed! Our first meeting for the year will be held in early Feb. The blog will be updated soon with details. In the meantime, you may be interested in the opportunities below:

 

Volunteers are needed for Digital Humanities Australasia 2014

We’re seeking to recruit 10 volunteers to assist over the 3 days (18-20 March). Volunteers will receive an official DHA2014 t-shirt and are free to attend conference sessions associated with their volunteer stint. Responsibilities may include assisting with registration, distributing programs, showing people to events or simply helping ensure things are in the right place (e.g. chairing documents). We’ll work around your schedule. Just let us know which days/s you are free. Interested? Email johawkins@gmail.com.

 

Don't miss the Digital Antipodes at DHA2014!

We are absolutely thrilled to see so many of the Digital Antipodes delivering papers and running workshops at DHA2014. You can take a look at the event program here.
Papers and panel sessions include:

• Brett Hirsch, Philip Mead - Debate: That Literary Studies Needs More Graphs, Maps, and Trees
• Ethan Blue (with Zephyr Frank) -  Mapping the Routes and Roots of American Deportation
• Jenni Harrison (with Darren Gibson) - The altruistic crowd – the ethics of using social data in humanist research
• Jo Hawkins - Historian to Hacker in 48 hours: Why do so few humanists attend civic hacking events?
• Patricia Alessi - Early English opera and the Digital?: The utilisation of digital approaches in historically- informed performance practice opera re-creations
• Susan Taylor Suchy - Engaging the "Quaint" Creative Writing Classroom in the Social Media Marketplace
• Toby Burrows - Mandelbrot, Braudel and Taleb: fractal geometry and randomness in history
• Toby Burrows (with Deb Verhoeven) - Deploying Ontologies in the Humanities and Creative Arts
• Toby Burrows (with Deb Verhoeven) - Integrating research in the humanities: the HuNI Virtual Laboratory

 

Register for a free workshop at DHA2014 - The #Altac Track: Strategies to imagine and build alternative academic careers

How can PhD students better locate their research and work in an employable context? This free, 3-hour workshop will explore strategies and tools to help PhD candidates and early career researchers imagine and build alternative academic careers. It will include a panel session with several practicing “alt-academics”, hands-on activities and plenty of lively discussion and debate. This workshop is free of charge – however prior registration is required. Seats are limited! Register today.

DHA 2014 (18-20 March)

Don't miss our final meetings for 2013: The #alt-ac Track

Last week's session on alternative academic careers was extremely well attended - so we decided to run two follow-up sessions to help generate outcomes for our upcoming #alt-ac career development workshop at DHA2014.

Don't forget to put these meeting dates in your diaries:

Lost in translation: Preparing CVs for alternative academic careers

Fri 22 Nov, 2-3pm, iVEC boardroom (in Physics Building, opp Reid Library)

 

Questions for discussion

• How can we translate academic skill-sets into CVs for non-academic jobs?
• What additional experience and competencies are most advantageous - and how can we develop these during our candidature?
• Technology has lowered entry barriers to develop technical skill-sets and make your ideas a reality. You don’t need to ask for permission to unleash your creativity. Take a look at Digital Humanist Tim Sherratt’s website and Wraggelabs as an example.
• Is your digital footprint the new CV?

How should I prepare?

• Search for a job you think may be suited for a digital humanist and bring along the selection criteria - or imagine a new role that doesn't exist yet
• http://www.seek.com.au/
• http://www.jobsearch.gov.au/
• http://www.unijobs.com.au/
• Read the list of graduate attributes for PhD graduates (p.55-57) in 'The Changing PhD: Discussion Paper, Group of Eight, March 2013.’ (PDF Document, 540KB).

Imagining new spaces: Strategies to conceptualise and build alternative academic careers during your PhD

Fri 13 Dec, 2-3pm, Location TBC (Likely to be the UWA Club - pls bring a laptop or tablet)

 

Questions for discussion

• Are there 'new rules' for completing a PhD in the humanities?
• If so, how do they differ from conversational wisdom?
• How can universities better prepare PhD candidates for non-academic careers? Can postgraduate students contribute to this kind of structural change?
• Much of the literature regarding #alt-ac careers originates from North America. What specificities are unique to Australia?

How should I prepare?

• Review the readings from our first #alt-ac session.
• Many digital humanists have personal websites. Browse a selection of websites and consider how and why scholars express their values, experience, research interests and skills.
• Tim Sherratt - Manager of Trove
• Jason Ensor - Digital Humanities Research & Technical Development Manager, University of Western Sydney
• Paul Arthur - Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Western Sydney
• Bethanie Nowviskie - Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library
• Seb Chan - Director of Digital & Emerging Media, Smithsonian Museum, New York
• Ryan Hunt - Postgraduate Student, University of Western Ontario

Next Fri 8 Nov - “Tenure is broken. Please give me tenure.” Exploring alt-ac careers in the humanities

Why humanities PhD progs can't ignore #alt-ac career paths anymore: MT @briancroxall: Graduate school: just don't go! http://t.co/DbAyRJqj
— Amanda Watson (@amndw2) December 30, 2011

PhD candidates and early career researchers in the humanities are often advised that few will secure tenure-track positions. Given the realities of the competitive  academic job market - why aren't more of us discussing hybrid and alternative career options? Join us next Friday to investigate a growing movement towards alternative academic (alt-ac) careers.

When: Friday 8 November, 2-3pm
Where: Arts room 1.33 (CHE meeting room).

Questions we'll be asking include:

• What does an alt-ac career look like?
• What are the most effective alt-ac career building strategies?
• What are the main challenges associated with hybrid careers and how might they be overcome?
• What is the relationship between Digital Humanities and alt-ac?
• How could UWA better prepare early career researchers in the humanities for non-academic careers?

Readings:

Bethany Nowviskie, The #alt-ac Track: Negotiating Your ‘Alternative Academic’ Appointment, Chronicle of Higher Ed, August 31, 2010.

Brian Croxhall, Five Questions and Three Answers about Alt-Ac,  7 January 2012.

Lisa Spiro, What Is *She* Doing Here? Crafting a Professional Identity as a Digital Humanist/Librarian, #Alt-academy, 7 May 2011.

Tom Scheinfeldt, Toward a Third Way: Rethinking Academic Employment, 6 May 2011.

Source: HASTAC

Also see:

http://www.gradhacker.org/

http://versatilephd.com/

This Friday! A report from DH Conference 2013 (Nebraska) by Toby Burrows

We're excited to be back from hiatus! Over the past few months we've enjoyed IAS Digital Humanities masterclasses from Harold Short and Paul Arthur, along with a keynote from Alan Liu. With the DHA 2014 conference being held in Perth between 18-21 March 2014 it's an exciting time to be exploring this dynamic field.

Here are four things you should know:

1. Our next meeting will be held 2-3pm on Friday 4 October - A report from DH 2013 (Nebraska) by Toby Burrows

Toby attended DH2013 at the University of Nebraska in July and will be reporting on some of the highlights, with particular emphasis on 'get involved' activities including; DH Commons, GO-DH, Around DH in 80 Days, ADHO Special Interest Groups and 4humanities.org. We're keen to encourage DH experimentation and outcomes from the Digital Antipodes in 2014 and this session should offer plenty of ideas to help those new to the field to tip their toe in the water.

*****

IMPORTANT: Please note the  venue for our DH session this Friday 4 October (2-3pm) has changed.
We will be meeting at the UWA iVEC facility which is located on the ground floor of the Physics building (entrance opposite the Reid Library or through the main Physics foyer). The iVEC team have generously offered us the use of their boardroom for this meeting.

***** 

Toby has also suggested a thought-provoking reading for us all.
Dr Anne Galloway, 5 Things About Ubiquitous Computing That Make Me Nervous, The Design Culture Lab, March 31, 2013 (accessed 27 Sept 2013)

2. Don't miss the final IAS Digital Humanities Masterclasses for 2013!
Reading on/and Digital Platforms: A Digital Humanities Research Seminar with Dr Tully Barnett, Research Fellow, Creative Arts, Flinders University (21 Oct)
RSVP today!

Your chance to engage in debates surrounding digital texts.

 "Sven Birkerts reminds us that the human brain has been shaped by print and by the level of attention required for the long form of the book, and he argues that to do away with the book is to lose our humanity. Katherine Hayles tells us that other forms of reading can bring on dynamic transformations in cognition that do not need to be feared but can be embraced as complementary."

3. Rails Girls is coming to Perth! November 15 & 16.
Women are vastly under-represented in computer science and programming. Rails Girls aims to combat this by providing tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas - and it's coming to Perth! If you'd like to learn what it takes to build a simple web app, don't miss this free two-day workshop for women who want to learn to code. Beginners welcome. Applications are open until October 28th. I've signed up and I think you should too.

4. The call for papers for the DHA 2014 closes on Monday 30 September.
You still have a couple of days to submit an abstract for DHA2014! For those new to DH, the conference, which will be held in Perth, offers a fantastic opportunity to become more directly involved in this research area.

The call for papers for Digital Humanities Australasia 2014 is now open!

The University of Western Australia is proud to be hosting the 2014 Digital Humanities Australasia Conference.

The call for papers is now open!

Abstracts must be submitted by 14 September 2013. Explore conference themes and find out more about this exciting event.

Why should digital humanists attend #GovHack?

GovHack is a 48 hour national hackathon where teams compete to create mashups, visualisations and apps using government data.

It was a fantastic event and an amazing opportunity to put digital humanities into practice. I am very keen to register some UWA teams in 2014!

Our team created Pixtory - an iPhone app that allows users to uncover the hidden history around them. Pixtory collects and exposes geo-tagged historic photos from the State Library of WA's photographic archive. The result is an immersive experience that facilitates meaningful encounters with Perth's history and heritage.

We were incredibly proud to win the 'Spirit of GovHack' Award for the Perth event - a prize awarded to the team that demonstrated what GovHack is all about.

Vote for Pixtory in the GovHack People's Choice Awards!
You can vote up until Wednesday night (5th June 2013). All you need to do is register on the site, then log on, visit our team page and vote using the flames.
 

 Cross post from my blog (www.historypunk.com).