Digital Humanities Developer

Description

This position designs and builds rich-client, web-based applications to support Digital Humanities projects on Yale’s campus. Using dynamic scripting languages such as Python and Ruby, the Programmer/Analyst produces back-end, web-server code that turns research ideas into concrete reality. Working in partnership with a UX & Visual Designer, this position is responsible for both new software platforms, as well as the adoption of open-source projects for use at Yale.

The Programmer/Analyst focuses on technological solutions and platforms that are crucial to Digital Humanities work. The majority of the systems involved in the DHLab fit within either the LAMP or Ruby on Rails technology stacks. The Programmer/Analyst works in a Linux web server environment, and deploys MVC-based, RESTful web applications. The position creates, maintains, and updates open-source repositories of code developed at Yale, as well as projects adapted from other institutions. The position works with both traditional relational and NoSQL database contexts, depending on the requirements of the specific project (such as managing crowd-sourced contributions from thousands of participants.)

The individual in this position will work to capture requirements from project leaders in an ongoing and iterative process. This role has the sole responsibility for determining the architecture, design, data schema, and development timeline to bring technical projects to successful completion. This position works alongside faculty, students, and librarians as clients and collaborators, to specify and realize complex Digital Humanities projects, and is responsible for evaluating project needs and recommending and implementing the best solution.

This position is a member of the newly-formed Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) at Yale, housed in Sterling Memorial Library at the heart of campus. The lab serves Yale scholars who wish to collaborate across disciplines, with a focus on STEM/Arts & Humanities (STEAM) projects. This role supports projects that pair specialists in computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, and other STEM fields with partners in the humanities and the arts.

Required Education, Skills and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in a related field and five years of related work experience or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Strong interpersonal and communications skills and demonstrated ability to work as part of collaborative teams. Ability to communicate effectively with faculty, students, and staff.
• Demonstrated project management skills including background managing multiple priorities and experience with full lifecycle development. Proven ability to participate in and lead iterative discovery of project requirements from clients and organize those requirements into logical project phases.
• Exceptional skillset in Ruby and/or Python; ability to implement code written in other languages (such as PHP frameworks and/or Node.js) as necessary.
• Proven ability to deploy code in web contexts, such as HTML5, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript, and jQuery or similar; proficiency in revision control systems (such as GitHub), the UNIX command line (such as OS X and Linux), and databases (such as MySQL, MongoDB etc.).
• Ability to work effectively in digital humanities, academic technology, academic libraries, museums, cultural heritage or similar environments.

Preferred Education, Skills and Experience:  Master’s Degree in computer science, computer engineering, or similar.  Previous experience with one or more of the following areas: Crowd-sourced annotations, Corpus Query Engines, Geo-Spatial Analysis, Machine Learning Toolkits, or Data Visualization Libraries.