IDHMC at TAMU offers Postdoc in Digital Humanities

The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University, announces a postdoctoral research fellowship for the academic year 2013-2014 in the area of digital humanities. This position is in association with the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) and 18thConnect. This is a one-year appointment sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts Strategic Planning Grant. The position will begin on September 1, 2013.

Joining a team of faculty, alternate academic staff, and graduate students, our research associate will be immersed in the scholarly communication community. He or she will help organize academic peer review of digital projects, work with large humanities data sets, and become part of the discussion of humanities metadata standards. ARC is the umbrella organization for multiple digital research nodes, accessed through the web -NINES, 18thConnect, MESA - that contain resources spanning the bulk of existing Western documents, from medieval times to the early 20th-century. Each ARC node contains data about historical documents, scanned page images (with text transcriptions), scholarly research, and open-source teaching and research tools (Juxta, TypeWright). Our research associate will also be involved in the development and promotion of existing and future ARC applications, including Collex (a COLLections and Exhibits builder), Juxta, TypeWright, Aletheia Web, Cobre, and edition builder software. Our research associate will be expected to explore the implications of emerging humanities research paradigms through his or her own research as well as by working collaboratively with the IDHMC and ARC team to nurture and develop the future of ARC. We are looking for a postdoctoral fellow who can critically engage issues of scholarly communication in the academy, digital scholarship, and the improvement of metadata standards for humanities fields, while also managing projects and working collaboratively with a large team. The IDHMC expects our research fellow to continue to keep up with disciplinary research and digital humanities professionalization, and we will support these efforts with limited travel funding.

Our research associate will share in a set of responsibilities that include the following:
. Collaborate with ARC node teams at multiple institutions to
aggregate and index period-specific metadata.
. Assist the ARC team in negotiation with content providers, major
institutions, and proprietary data holders.
. Assist the ARC team in the maintenance and improvement of the ARC
catalog (catalog.ar-c.org) and Solr indexer. Collaborate with the ARC project manager to design and develop structured training for new project managers.
. Help to ensure the sustainability of the ARC organization by
investigating and instigating an archive of ARC development and business.
. Help to ensure the sustainability of all ARC nodes by researching
and proposing solutions to untenable software. Evaluate metadata standards in the humanities community and participate in the proposal of new standards.
. Help to manage the open-source efforts for COLLEX and other
ARC-developed applications.
. Coordinate outreach activities for ARC at major disciplinary
conferences.
. Coordinate outreach activities for ARC and the nodes through
social media and blogging platforms.
. Perform other duties as required.

PhD in humanities or social sciences field required. Experience with digital humanities research methods required.
Some project management experience preferred; experience in developing or working on an archive, metadata standards (preferably able to handle variations of Dublin Core metadata), and database and repository
manipulation preferred.

To apply for this job, please visit TAMU's JobPath website at
https://jobpath.tamu.edu/postings/60037

For more information, please contact Laura Mandell, Director, IDHMC ( idhmc@tamu.edu).