Carnegie Mellon University is hiring a DH Developer!
I’ve had a blast since starting as Digital Humanities Specialist at CMU. Enough administrators, faculty, and students are on board to make building a DH strength here pretty easy, and we’re neighbors to Pitt DHRX, a really supportive supercomputing center, and great allies in the Mayor’s Office keen on a city rich with art, data, and both combined.
We want a developer to help jump-start our research efforts. You’ll be working as a full collaborator on projects from all sorts of domains, and as a review board member you’ll have a strong say in which projects they are and how they get implemented. You and I will work together in achievable rapid prototyping, analyzing data, and web deployment.
The idea is we build or do stuff that’s scholarly, interesting, and can have a proof-of-concept or article done in a semester or two. With that, the project can go on to seek additional funding and a full-time specialized programmer, or we can finish there and all be proud authors or creators of something we enjoyed making.
Ideally, you have a social science, humanities, journalism, or similar research background, and the broad tech chops to create a d3 viz, DeepDream some dogs into a work of art, manage a NoSQL database, and whatever else seems handy. Ruby on Rails, probably.
We’re looking for someone who loves playing with new tech stacks, isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty, and knows how to talk to humans. You probably have a static site and a github account. You get excited by interactive data stories, and want to make them with us. This job values breadth over depth and done over perfect.
The job isn’t as insane as it sounds—you don’t actually need to be able to do all this already, just be the sort of person who can learn on the fly. A bachelor’s degree or similar experience is required, with a strong preference for candidates with some research background. You’ll need to submit or point to some examples of work you’ve done.
We’re an equal opportunity employer, and would love to see applications from women, minorities, or other groups who often have a tough time getting developer jobs. If you work here you can take two free classes a semester. Say, who wants a fancy CMU computer science graduate degree? We can offer an awesome city, friendly coworkers, and a competitive salary (also Pittsburgh’s cheap so you wouldn’t live in a closet, like in SF or NYC).
What I’m saying is you should apply ’cause we love you.
The ad, if you’re too lazy to click the link, or are scared CMU hosts viruses:
Job Description
Digital Humanities Developer, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Summary
The Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is undertaking a long-term initiative to foster digital humanities research among its faculty, staff, and students. As part of this initiative, CMU seeks an experienced Developer to collaborate on cutting edge interdisciplinary projects.
CMU is a world leader in technology-oriented research, and a highly supportive environment for cross-departmental teams. The Developer would work alongside researchers from Dietrich and elsewhere to plan and implement digital humanities projects, from statistical analyses of millions of legal documents to websites that crowdsource grammars of endangered languages. Located in the the Office of The Dean under CMU’s Digital Humanities Specialist, the developer will help start up faculty projects into functioning prototypes where they can acquire sustaining funding to hire specialists for more focused development.
The position emphasizes rapid, iterative deployment and the ability to learn new techniques on the job, with a focus on technologies intersecting data science and web development, such as D3.js, NoSQL, Shiny (R), IPython Notebooks, APIs, and Ruby on Rails. Experience with digital humanities or computational social sciences is also beneficial, including work with machine learning, GIS, or computational linguistics.
The individual in this position will work with clients and the digital humanities specialist to determine achievable short-term prototypes in web development or data analysis/presentation, and will be responsible for implementing the technical aspects of these goals in a timely fashion. As a collaborator, the Digital Humanities Developer will play a role in project decision-making, where appropriate, and will be credited on final products to which they extensively contribute.
Please submit a cover letter, phone numbers and email addresses for two references, a résumé or cv, and a page describing how your previous work fits the job, including links to your github account or other relevant previous work examples.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s Degree in humanities computing, digital humanities, informatics, computer science, related field, or equivalent combination of training and experience.
- At least one year of experience in modern web development and/or data science, preferably in a research and development team setting.
- Demonstrated knowledge of modern machine learning and web development languages and environments, such as some combination of Ruby on Rails, LAMP, Relational Databases or NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassanda, etc.), MV* & JavaScript (including D3.js), PHP, HTML5, Python/R, as well as familiarity with open source project development.
- Some system administration.
Preferred Qualifications
- Advanced degree in digital humanities, computational social science, informatics, or data science. Coursework in data visualization, machine learning, statistics, or MVC web applications.
- Three or more years at the intersection of web development/deployment and machine learning (e.g. data journalism or digital humanities) in an agile software environment.
- Ability to assess client needs and offer creative research or publication solutions.
- Any combination of GIS, NLTK, statistical models, ABMs, web scraping, mahout/hadoop, network analysis, data visualization, RESTful services, testing frameworks, XML, HPC.
Job Function: Research Programming
Primary Location: United States-Pennsylvania-Pittsburgh
Time Type: Full Time
Organization: DIETRICH DEAN’S OFFICE
Minimum Education Level: Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent
Salary: Negotiable