roughest & most inclusive categories of #alt-ac employment? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Project Management & DH Professions

roughest & most inclusive categories of #alt-ac employment?

(6 posts) (5 voices)

Asked 5 years ago by Bethany Nowviskie
Latest answer from Miriam Posner

Tags:

Bethany Nowviskie
Admin
I'm editing the forthcoming "#alt-academy" site at MediaCommons, which -- in a nutshell -- will include clusters of essays on alternative academic careers for humanities scholars and take a bottom-up, publish-then-filter approach to welcoming new content.

We're modeling the site after MediaCommons' successful project, "The New Everyday." Like that site, we could, if it's useful, include a little field in people's profiles for indicating something about their professional identities. TNE uses categories like "Graduate Student, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Librarian, Administrator/Staff" at Institution X.

In ways, these are useful, at-a-glance labels for getting a sense of who is contributing to the site. For an #alt-ac project, however -- which is all about hybrid professional status and the variety of employment options for people who willfully transcend categories -- labels stink!

I can't list all options. And I don't want to list so few, or such rigid ones that everybody feels alienated and opts out, picks the same catch-all category ("hybrid" or "#alt-ac professional?"), or reluctantly selects a label that doesn't speak to them at all.

Then again, I'm the girl who writes down a different profession every time she goes through Customs. Help!

Please suggest some decent and useful categories of #alt-accers, or convince me to do away with this feature entirely.
Tweet this question
Posted 5 years ago Permalink
briancroxall
Member

If it's not possible to give people a blank text field for them to add their own title to, then I think it's not in the interest of the project to lock them into categories. Perhaps a different compromise would be to give people the option to list what part of campus they are associated with, like "Library," "academic department," "DH center," etc. But even then, you're going to have a hard time accounting for everyone who is alt-ac.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Dorothea Salo
Member

Possibly one way to un-alienate the hybrid is to allow this to be a free-text field, or to treat it as tags/checkboxes (that is, allowing multiple labels per person) rather than a single radio button?

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Jason Boyd
Member

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Jason Boyd
Member

I agree that if you are going to have a field for an alt-ac's job title, it should be a free-text field. I find that even the job title one has as an alt-ac is often either inadequate or opague, and doesn't adequately represent the range of activities one might be engaged in, so having a field that allows one to elaborate on what one does in addition to what one is called would also be a useful feature.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Jason Boyd
Member

I agree that if you are going to have a field for an alt-ac's job title, it should be a free-text field. I find that even the job title one has as an alt-ac is often either inadequate or opague, and doesn't adequately represent the range of activities one might be engaged in, so having a field that allows one to elaborate on what one does in addition to what one is called would also be a useful feature.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Bethany Nowviskie
Admin

Thanks, everybody! I'll experiment with a free-text field, which I'd much prefer personally. The way this text ripples through the various templates of the site means that people will need to be fairly concise in what they say. Things are set up by default to support "name, role/title at institution or org." That kind of re-use (in bylines, etc.) was what prevented me from doing multiple check-boxes in the first place. There was also some sense among the MediaCommons editors that there's value in gathering, across all our projects, rough demographics as to commenters and contributors -- but not, in this rather special case, if it results in pigeon-holing.

(Just as I was writing this, I received a query from a grad student on whose dissertation committee I'm serving. How should I be listed on her title page, in a field not designed for anything other than "Assistant/Associate/(full) Professor?" These small matters of professional identity really get at the heart of the #alt-ac project!)

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Miriam Posner
Member

I agree that full-text fields might be the way to go (perhaps with auto-complete suggestions, if possible). It always makes me feel like kind of a loser when there's no option to describe my job.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.