Monday, November 18, 2019

A Letter to My Future Self: How to Get Ready for a New Career Or, How Teaching Career Diversity for Historians Opened the Door Leading out of the Academy




If you’re reading this missive, it means that you’ve started to give serious consideration to leaving the professoriate. I might say, “Congratulations,” but I don’t know the circumstances. Maybe you’ve stopped looking forward to being in the classroom. Maybe you’ve run out of research ideas (I know, this sounds unlikely). Maybe you can’t stand your colleagues any longer but know the odds against lateral move. Or maybe the state government has succeeded in destroying the public university system. I don’t know what’s brought you to this point, but I do have confidence that you can make this transition to a new career.

Do you remember when we decided to pursue a doctorate? Super-Past Amanda decided to go to graduate school when she was a young pup of 20. Super-Past Amanda really enjoyed her first US history classes and thought she’d like to learn more. Although she gave herself permission to drop out if so inclined, once she got to graduate school she just kept going. When she finished the PhD in 1999, landing an academic job was a crapshoot with even odds. The “jobs crisis” dating to the 1970s hadn’t yet turned into the structural divide of the twenty-first century academic job market. When she lucked into an academic position that the first choice candidate turned down, she settled into the job and built a life around it. A good life, until now, when you’re considering whether to leave the faculty.

You don’t have to be trapped by Super-Past Amanda’s myopic decision-making. You aren’t less competent than she was. You know from parenting your daughters that you can’t map out your whole life. You should make the next right choice. Perhaps that means it’s time to leave the academy.

It might have been a while since you taught a course on Career Diversity, so I want to remind you some of what Past Amanda learned this spring semester teaching graduate students about planning their own professional paths.

There are plenty of resources for PhDs seeking careers outside the academy. I know that you know about Imagine PhD, Basalla and Debelius’s “So What Are You Going to Do with That ?,”[1] the AHA’s first-person essays from a broad range of historians, VersatilePhD, and Beyond the Professoriate. I won’t try to summarize their insights. Instead, here are some personal suggestions to lay the groundwork for your next steps. Hopefully you are still cultivating these practices, but in case you forgot about them, here’s a reminder from your past self about why they are worthwhile.

First, you should use your energies for your community, outside your formal job. Volunteering for the public good helps you recognize your existing skills that non-academics see as valuable. Is the mayor of your small city (himself a former humanities professor turned politician) still giving you opportunities to participate in local government? Past Amanda has already worked her way up from chairing a short-term task force on the city’s housing code to membership on the relatively relaxed Architectural Review Board and now the city’s Plan Commission. Keep it up and build your local network. When your neighbors know what you can do, they might open professional doors for you.

Second, you should deliberately undertake professional development, even though professors generally don’t use that term. The PhD is a terminal degree, but it shouldn’t be the end of your education. Obviously your teaching and research have taught you more about history. But you should also keeping learning new skills. Remember that writing project that introduced you to WordPress? The time you put in then paid off when your digital history project ended up on a WordPress platform. You started playing with coding after a visit to your daughter’s middle school Tech Ed class; how far did you get on Code.org? I’m not saying you ever have to penetrate the mysteries of the photocopier—there are limits after all—but do welcome the possibilities that intrigue you.

Finally, keep up those connections with your students. Your decades in the classroom mean that you have already built relationships with students who are now embedded in work environments that welcome historians. Other professors probably won’t be helpful building your new career, but the students who remember you fondly might be excited to have the chance to return your service with an informational interview or an entrĂ©e to a position. Your students already know you respect them as whole people whom you want to help for their own sake. They might welcome the chance to see you as a whole person as well.

Know that your PhD is not an anvil weighing down your job search. Rather, like other forms of education, a PhD is a battery: it powers you, and it fits a wide variety of machines. Whether you want to leave your career or are feeling forced to, you can adapt your PhD to many different applications. To be sure, your PhD is a C battery—suited for flashlights, radios, toys, and tools. To fulfill your childhood dream of a seat on the Supreme Court, you will need to earn that (J)D battery instead. But your PhD is never wasted, even if it is time to try it out somewhere new.

Love,

Present Amanda




[1] Susan Basalla and Maggie DeBelius, “So What Are You Going to Do with That?’: Finding Careers Outside Academia, 3rd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; originally published 2001 by Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Russian Bots, a found poem




When we planned the Encyclopediaof Milwaukee (EMKE) in the late 2000s, we wanted to invite user comments. But also we wanted to be able to moderate the comments. The quality of user comments on news stories was notoriously low, and we were warned that we would spend a lot of time deleting Viagra ads and other spam. So our IT team set up our site so that users have to register before they can comment. A moderator has to release a comment before it is visible to the public. We’ve been open for comments since our first entries went live in March of 2016.
The project is having a long and slow soft launch while we get all 700 entries through our workflow. So it’s not surprising that we did not get a lot of registrations, much less comments, to start off. But beginning around September 2016, we had a noticeable uptick in newly registered accounts.
The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee is a locally-oriented digital history project. We expected that most of the people who wanted to register and leave comments would be from the Milwaukee area. But the handles and domain names of our new registrations did not look like we expected. Many were nonsense words; the extensions weren’t the familiar .com and .orgs; some were clearly spammers; and, fascinatingly, many ended with .ru. As in Russia. These new registrants didn’t leave comments. They just signed up and vanished again. Mysterious, eh?
For a while we just watched the registrations mount. Because digital history projects are collaborative, a whole team of people keeps tabs on site use. We want to make sure we don’t miss a legitimate comment, so I felt obliged to look at all the new user notifications and forward them to my colleagues with a note that I was ignoring this one or that one. Eventually process this got tiresome, especially given the ratio of legitimate users to spammers. So in 2018, we had our IT team install a Stop Spammers plug-in to filter out bots. Between June 20, 2018 and May 20, 2019, it stopped 35,231 registrations.
But I couldn’t get the Russian registrations out of my head. What did they mean? Why did they target the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee? We all know about “Russian interference in the 2016 US election.” But how did the apparently harmless effort to sign up with my digital history project fit in to this picture? Was it a side effect of a fundamentally political project, or was the interference in the election itself a piece of a larger effort? Whatever their political views, historians are intellectually conservative folk. We know that to see the big picture, we need to have all the pieces to look at—or at least enough pieces to be confident that we aren’t missing something huge. I would like to know what these registrations mean, but I’m not ready to pronounce a historical analysis of them.
Instead, I decided to write a poem, to share a sense of the experience and throw out to the world my piece of the picture. That’s why I wrote “Russian bots, a found poem.”

How did I compose this poem? While my students were taking their final exam last week, I found all the user notifications for the EMKE and manually pulled out every username and email address that looked to me like spam. I didn’t think to harvest the time stamps on the registrations so that I could make some inferences about whether they might have originated with people working in other time zones, and I don’t have the technical chops to scrape the data out of my email. I ended up with a list of 214 distinct registrations. I then separated each registration into three component parts: user registration name, the email handle, and the domain name of each email address. Just for fun, I visualized each set of components using WordClouds.com.
Here are the domains. I wanted to keep the @ signs with the domains, but again I am not technically proficient enough to stop the word cloud generator from deleting them.



 Here are the email handles:

Here are the usernames registered on the EMKE website:

To compose the poem, I compiled all three lists back into one dataset and alphabetized them using Excel. My plan was to make an acrostic poem using the first letter of the elements (excluding the @ signs). Based on my dataset, I had the entire English alphabet at my disposal—except Q and X—and many choices within some letter groups. Next I posed the question “Why were so many Encyclopedia of Milwaukee registrations Russian?” and arranged it vertically to create the acrostic. Then I inspected my list of usernames, handles, and domains and chose the ones that seemed most interesting and appealing, matching each to an appropriate letter in the acrostic. I was careful only to use a given option once in the poem even if it appeared multiple times on my list. I’m a humanist, so I felt perfectly comfortable making impressionistic rather than systematic selections. I retained the original capitalization and punctuation. Each of these “words” then became its own line in the poem, which ends with my inserted question mark. I visualized the poem as a picture using Branah.com’stext-to-image converter.