H-Net Project

Visualizing the academic job market

ABOUT THE PROJECT

This project represents the cumulative efforts of undergraduates enrolled in the Digital Humanities minor at Michigan State University and reflects the extent of their efforts to clean a patchy data set, review relevant online resources, generate data visualizations using an unfamiliar digital tool, collaborate across disciplines, and assemble a website to display accumulated findings. The students were given a list of job postings taken from H-Net, an all-purposes resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences, for the years 2011-2019 and asked to discover potential research questions that could be answered using the data. Over the course of a semester, the students convened bi-weekly to construct and enhance their project while also utilizing their course instructor and various campus resources to complete their task. In particular we would like to thank:

Digital Scholarship Librarian, Megan Kudzia, for assistance cleaning the original data set with OpenRefine.
Alice Lynn McMichael and Jack Biggs from LEADR for teaching us how to use Tableau Public to visualize our data.
H-Net Systems Administrator, Dennis Boone, for providing us with our data set.

More about H-NET

Understading Job Boards

Visualizations

The following images were created in Tableau, an analytics platform for visualizing data. The data was taken from the H-Net Job Guide database for the years 2011 to 2018. The independent variable given was the number of job postings. After exploring and formatting the data set, we chose to focus on the most reliable data which includes postdate, institution name, country/state, and area of study ("Primary Category"). Expanding on our data set, we created two additional categories: academic consortium and regional accreditation.

Sheet 2 (3) (1).png

Sheet 2 (1).png

Sheet 2 (5) (1).png

Sheet 2 (2).png

Sheet 2 (4).png

Sheet 2 (4) (1).png

Sheet 2 (6) (1).png

Sheet 2 (2) (1).png

Accreditation 2011-2018.png

Top 10 Area of Study Over Time.png

Primary Cat. 2011 (Big 10).png

Primary Cat. 2012 (Big 10).png

Primary Cat. 2013 (Big 10).png

Primary Cat. 2014 (Big 10).png

Primary Cat. 2015 (Big 10).png

Primary Cat. 2016 (Big 10).png

Primary Cat. 2017 (Big 10).png

Primary Cat. 2018 (Big 10).png

Area of Study & Accreditation.png

Area of Study & Accreditation (2).png

Area of Study & Accreditation (3).png

Sheet 3.png

Sheet 2_edited.png

Top 10 Area of Study 2011-2018.png

Main Findings

OUR DATA

The H-Net Data source, which we originally recieved as an Excel spreadsheet, was found to have several inconsistencies that, if left unchecked, would lead to misleading represenations. While the data was not perfectly corrected, we found the last iteration to be filled with the least amount of uncertainties and deviations.

To Explaination

The Team

Kent10 2 copy.JPG

Market Research

Advertising and Art Direction

Kent Kubani

36990032_2161404523889655_91609587575202

Website Architecture

Project Synthesis

Socio-Cultural Anthropology

Adam Austad

Visual Statistics

Website Architecture

Packaging Science

Digital Humanities

Colleen Kosanke

Website Architecture

Visual Statistics

Media & Information

Eric Hussey

Website Architecture

Visual Statistics

Arts and Humanities

Digital Humanities

Marlee Guilford

Content Research

Visual Statistics

Arts and Humanities

Global Studies

Carly Nesbitt

Data Maintenance

Arts and Humanities

Andrew Duris

Academic Adviser

H-Net Associate Director

Digital Humanities Faculty

Jesse Draper

This site was designed with the

website builder. Create your website today.Start Now