• Jin Gao University College London,
• Melissa Terras University of Edinburgh

University College London

Digital Humanities (DH) has long been subject to ongoing debate regarding its scope, identity, and professional boundaries (Terras et al. 2013). We address these questions empirically by examining DH through the lens of the labour market, using graduate career outcomes as evidence for how the field is practically defined and understood. It builds on the keynote by Melissa Terras at the Digital Humanities Congress 2024, which highlighted the need for systematic evidence on DH graduate career trajectories, and surveys universities in the UK and Ireland.

We present findings from a 2025 survey of 131 DH graduates who completed their courses between 2002 and 2025 across 17 UK-Ireland universities. [1] Our results show, firstly, that DH employment outcomes (DHeo) are not confined to Academia/Research (32%), with respondents also working in Technology/Software (26%), GLAM/Heritage (18%), Public sector/NGO (10%), and Publishing/Media (8%), among others (Figure 1). Because “industry” was multi-selected, these percentages reflect overall presence rather than exclusive distribution. However, the pattern is clear that DHeo spans research, IT industry, cultural heritage, media and the public sector, which challenges the previous discussion that 75% of DH jobs are obtained within academia (Wang et al. 2021).

Figure 1: Results of Question 10 What industry do you work in? showing DHeo careers distribution in different sectors

Secondly, job roles cluster into both discovery and delivery functions. While academic roles such as Research/RA/Postdoc (17.6%) and Teaching/Lecturer (8.1%) remain significant, technical and operational roles including Project/Product Manager, Data Analyst/Scientist, Developer/Engineer, and UX/Designer collectively account for 33.8%. GLAM and public sector roles further demonstrate the hybrid nature of DHeo (28%), which blends collections informatics, usability, accessibility, and research collaboration. This hybridity reflects what the “creative tensions” between data, humanities, teaching, research, and service, that are “deliberately needful” rather than problematic, which help to explain why DH graduates are particularly legible and attractive to employers across sectors (Booth 2024). These findings also align with existing understandings of DH interdisciplinarity (Winters and Sichani 2023).

Thirdly, employability for DH graduates is strong, with 57% securing work within three months of graduating, 16% within three to six months, and only 4% taking more than a year (Figure 2). While this does not resolve questions of long-term career progression, it challenges persistent stereotypes that humanities-based graduates struggle with employability (Edmondson et al. 2020). Moreover, these findings connect to broader arguments about the value of humanities education, that humanities and arts-based degrees cultivate transferable skills and capacities valued across sectors, including critical thinking, ethical awareness, communication, and adaptability, rather than exclusively academic specialisation (Belfiore 2013).

Figure 2: Results of Question 12 How long did it take you to find your first job after graduating?

Surveyed skill preferences further show the character of DH as a field that integrates practical, technical, and critical capacities. Graduates highlight Data analysis and Data visualisation (75 responses), Text analysis/NLP (70), Programming (65), Databases/SQL (57), Project management (47), alongside critical competencies such as Critical thinking/theory (126) and Data ethics (42). This confirms that DH education cultivates both operational expertise and critical engagement, which supports previous scholarship that frames DH as a site of critical technical practice rather than a simple opposition between tools and theory (Nowviskie 2016).

In relation to ongoing debates within global DH communities and the continuing expansion of DH programmes, these findings have direct implications for pedagogy and workforce development. Programmes should retain core practical skills while strengthening training in critical review, governance, and ethical depth. Our survey suggests that DH should be understood not merely as a collection of technical competencies, but as a field that links infrastructure-building with interpretation, reflexivity, and responsibility. Rather than being marginal or ambiguously defined, DH emerges here as a clearly employable, structurally hybrid, and intellectually grounded domain that continues to evolve, demonstrated by its graduates’ professional trajectories.

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1. including University College London, King’s College London, University of Cambridge, University of York, Durham University, University of London School of Advanced Study, University of Galway, Lancaster University, University College Cork, University of Sheffield, University of Glasgow, University of Exeter, University of Leeds, Trinity College Dublin, Maynooth University, University of Edinburgh, the Open University

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References

Belfiore, Eleonora. 2013. ‘The “Rhetoric of Gloom” v. the Discourse of Impact in the Humanities: Stuck in a Deadlock?’ In Humanities in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Upchurch. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361356_2.

Booth, Alison. 2024. ‘Useless (Digital) Humanities’. Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities, January 1. https://www.academia.edu/97817543/Useless_Digital_Humanities.

Edmondson, John, Piero Formica, and Jay Mitra. 2020. ‘Special Issue: Empathy, Sensibility and Graduate Employment – Can the Humanities Help?’ Industry and Higher Education 34 (4): 223–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950422220928821.

Nowviskie, Bethany. 2016. ‘On the Origin of “Hack” and “Yack”’. In Debates in the Digital Humanities: 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

Terras, Melissa M., Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds. 2013. Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. Ashgate Publishing Limited ; Ashgate Publishing Company.

Wang, Yahan, Zhiya Zuo, and Xi Wang. 2021. ‘Digital Humanities in the Job Market’. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 58 (1): 857–59. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.588.

Winters, Jane, and Anna-Maria Sichani. 2023. ‘The Role of Digital Humanities in an Interdisciplinary Research Project’. Science Museum Group Journal 18 (18). https://doi.org/10.15180/221812.

 

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the alumni respondents from the 17 UK and Ireland programmes who completed the Digital Humanities Career Survey. Their time and reflections made this study possible. We’d also like to thank the wider research team for their substantive contributions to survey design, distribution, and discussion: Leif Isaksen, Elizabeth Williamson, Gemma Poulton, Michael Pidd, Catriona Cooper, Paul Gooding, Donald Sturgeon, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, Ian Gregory, Lorna-Jane Richardson, Caroline Bassett, Anne Alexander, Hugo Leal.

 

• Sofia Papastamkou University of Luxembourg

University of Luxembourg

Focusing primarily on the Computers and the Humanities surveys (1971–1987), this paper examines how early pedagogical knowledge in humanities computing was articulated, circulated, and consolidated, and identifies the main issues that structured these discussions.

 

Between 1971 and 1987, Computers and the Humanities (CHum) organized five surveys devoted to teaching computers in the humanities (Bowles 1971; Campo 1972; Allen 1974; Rudman 1978; Rudman 1987). Founded in 1966 by Joseph Raben, professor of English at Queens College, with support from an IBM grant, the journal marked the emergence of a scholarly community around humanities computing. The surveys functioned as instruments for collecting and disseminating information about courses that integrated computing into humanistic inquiry, with the explicit aim of encouraging similar initiatives elsewhere. Contributing to the institutionalisation of such courses and ultimately strengthening what would later be described as a community of practice, was among the journal’s programmatic objectives (Raben 1966).

 

The five surveys constitute a key source for investigating the place of pedagogy in the history of digital humanities and digital history (Papastamkou 2024 and 2025), an area that remains comparatively understudied in the field’s historiography (Georgopoulou et al. 2025, Hirsch 2012). They provide rare insight into the pedagogical materials used in the earliest humanities computing curricula, as well as into early assessments of what proved effective and what did not. These evaluations circulated within the scholarly community well before the digital data deluge of the past two decades and availability of pedagogical outputs that were electronically published and openly distributed through web technologies—what has been described as the “invisible college of digital history (Crymble 2019).

 

The surveys were conducted in 1971, 1972, 1974, 1978, and 1987. In each case, the results were analysed and published in a dedicated article in the journal. The corresponding appendices included both primary (raw) and secondary (processed, calculated, or synthesized) data. The present study is based on a partial reconstruction of the survey dataset by extracting material from these printed appendices. The source remains fragmentary, in particular because the 1987 survey survives only through secondary data and the elements discussed in its accompanying analysis. Beyond quantitative data, the surveys contain free-text responses detailing course aims, reflections, practical advice, and critical remarks. This paper focuses on these materials through a combined qualitative and quantitative reading in order to reconstruct a formative moment that preceded the community-led and open pedagogical practices that would characterise digital humanities from the 2000s onward (Kirschenbaum 2018, Varin 2013). Viewed through this early lens, the surveys reveal that many debates later associated with digital humanities pedagogy were already taking shape within the humanities computing community. These discussions would resurface in more formalised settings, including the digital humanities pedagogy conferences of the late 1980s (such as the Vassar workshop and the CATH conferences).

 

REFERENCES

Bowles, Edmund A. “Towards a Computer Curriculum for the Humanities.” Computers and the Humanities 6, no. 1 (1971): 35–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02402323.

Campo, Leila de. “Computer Courses for the Humanist: A Survey.” Computers and the Humanities 7, no. 1 (1972): 57–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02403762.

Crymble, Adam. Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age. Topics in the Digital Humanities. University of Illinois Press, 2021.

Hirsch, Brett D., ed. Digital Humanities Pedagogy : Practices, Principles and Politics. In Digital Humanities Pedagogy : Practices, Principles and Politics. Digital Humanities Series. Open Book Publishers, 2012. https://books.openedition.org/obp/1605.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?”. In Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 

Papastamkou, Sofia. “Teaching Historians “the ways of the machine”: Proto-debates, Actors, and Practices on Code Literacy in the Humanities, 1966 -1987.” Paper presented at Revolutionary, Disruptive, or Just Repeating Itself? Tracing the History of Digital History” #dhiha9, Paris, France, 24 October 2024 (to be published in 2026)

Papastamkou, Sofia. “A Digital Literacy in the Making. Teaching Computers to Historians/Humanists, 1960s-1980s.” Paper presented at History of Knowledge Conference, 8-10 October 2025, LUCK Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge

Raben, Joseph. “Prospect.” Computers and the Humanities 1, no. 1 (1966): 1–2.

Rudman, Joseph. “Computer Courses for Humanists: A Survey.” Computers and the Humanities 12, no. 3 (1978): 253–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02400087.

Rudman, Joseph. “Teaching Computers and the Humanities Courses: A Survey.” Computers and the Humanities 21, no. 4 (1987): 235–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00517812

Varin, Vanessa, “A Thoughtful Retrospective of One Historian’s Experience at THATCamp”, AHA Today January 11, 2013 available at Perspectives at History https://www.historians.org/, https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/january-2013/a-thoughtful-retrospective-of-one-historians-experience-at-thatcamp

• Seul Lee Florida State University,
• Sang Hoo Oh University of Sheffield

Florida State University

As generative artificial intelligence becomes integrated into educational systems, governments are producing guidance documents to manage its use in K-12 schools. While these documents are often framed as technical or procedural resources, they also shape normative ideas about how AI should be perceived, trusted, limited, and incorporated into learning settings. This research views national and regional AI guidelines as cultural texts that reflect emerging social and technical visions of education in the age of AI.

This study presents a comparative thematic analysis of K-12 AI guidance documents from the United States and the United Kingdom. The United States operates within a federal system in which individual states exercise important authority over K-12 education policy, resulting in heterogeneous AI guidance frameworks across jurisdictions. By contrast, the United Kingdom, as a unitary state with devolved educational authority, distributes responsibility for schooling across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, creating nationally coordinated yet regionally differentiated policy frameworks. By comparing these two governance models, this project examines how AI education and instruction are designed, implemented, and pedagogically framed within K-12 education systems in different countries. It analyzes how these subjects are prioritized, how risks and responsibilities are articulated, and what differing approaches arise in their direction across national contexts.

The dataset consists of publicly available state-level AI guidance documents in the United States and national or regional guidance issued by U.K. educational authorities. Using iterative qualitative coding, the study identifies recurring thematic clusters in both contexts. Although AI is viewed as both an opportunity and a risk in both countries, the 2023-2024 U.S. state-level AI guidance documents indicate an initial phase of stabilization in K-12 AI governance. This phase is characterized by academic integrity concerns, human-centered boundary setting, equity rhetoric, and gradual movement toward organized implementation frameworks. Notably, across both national contexts, equity and access concerns appear nearly universal; however, in several U.S. states in particular, academic integrity anxiety emerges as a primary early driver shaping the trajectory of AI policy discourse. In addition, in the U.S. state guidance documents, nearly every state includes some articulation of AI literacy, typically emphasizing understanding how AI systems work and fostering critical evaluation of AI-generated outputs. However, the concept of AI literacy is defined inconsistently across states. Some states conceptualize it as technical proficiency, others as ethical discernment or digital citizenship, and a few embed it within existing computer science standards. This divergence reveals a broader conceptual ambiguity in how AI literacy is constructed and institutionalized within K-12 policy discourse.

Preliminary results reveal several differences in emphasis across different national contexts. Overall, U.S. state documents often present AI in terms of innovation, workforce readiness, and institutional responsibility, frequently highlighting concerns about academic integrity and plagiarism. U.K. guidelines, on the other hand, more consistently place AI within frameworks of safeguarding, child protection, and data governance influenced by broader regulations like GDPR. Although both countries emphasize AI literacy, their underlying concepts differ. In the U.S., literacy is often seen as an adaptable technological skill, whereas in the U.K., it is more closely linked to digital citizenship and responsible use. Furthermore, there is variation in the depth of policy operationalization. Certain states provide detailed assessment rubrics, phased integration models, and implementation checklists, whereas others articulate principles at a rhetorical level without translating them into actionable frameworks. Lastly, it is notable that the policy frameworks referenced differ across national contexts. In many cases, AI governance is layered onto existing privacy and data protection structures rather than being developed as a standalone regulatory domain.

 

Keywords: K-12 AI Education, AI Literacy and Ethics, Comparative Analysis