DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP DEVELOPER

Description

About Northeastern:

Founded in 1898, Northeastern is a global research university and the recognized leader in experience-driven lifelong learning. Our world-renowned experiential approach empowers our students, faculty, alumni, and partners to create impact far beyond the confines of discipline, degree, and campus.

Our locations—in Boston; Charlotte, North Carolina; London; Portland, Maine; San Francisco; Seattle; Silicon Valley; Toronto; Vancouver; and the Massachusetts communities of Burlington and Nahant—are nodes in our growing global university system. Through this network, we expand opportunities for flexible, student-centered learning and collaborative, solutions-focused research.

Northeastern’s comprehensive array of undergraduate and graduate programs— in a variety of on-campus and online formats—lead to degrees through the doctorate in nine colleges and schools. Among these, we offer more than 195 multi-discipline majors and degrees designed to prepare students for purposeful lives and careers.

About the Opportunity:

Do you build innovative applications to transform raw data into engaging online experiences?

As part of a new developer cluster hire, the Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) in Northeastern University's Library is excited to open a search for a Digital Scholarship Developer. This position will create and augment a variety of digital humanities projects as part of the research and teaching missions of Northeastern University, working closely with the DSG team, Library Technology Services, and the newly-formed Research Data Services team. This position is joined by a Data Engineer and a Semantic Data Specialist which together will focus on creating sustainable platforms for community-driven digital scholarship. Together with Northeastern’s recent faculty cluster search in digital humanities, these positions represent the university’s ongoing commitment to digital scholarship.

Responsibilities:

The Digital Scholarship Developer will play a central role in designing and building middleware services to handle the publication of dynamic and contributory digital humanities projects. Working closely with the Senior Digital Scholarship Developer, the Data Engineer, experts from Research Data Services, and other core Library staff and University faculty, this position creates shared tools that support a number of different digital research projects at varied levels of scale, drawing data from digital repositories, structured data sources, and public APIs. The position works with data from a variety of sources and makes that data accessible to user-facing tools, services, and interfaces such as data visualization applications, user interfaces and channels. This work might include analysis, modeling, and processing or transforming of data (in collaboration with the Data Engineer and DSG analysts). The Digital Scholarship Developer also contributes to DSG’s long-term strategic analysis of the technology needs of new and evolving projects, and offers near-term solutions as well as strategic long-term planning. This position will primarily involve development in Ruby on Rails, though other languages such as Python, PHP, JavaScript, and CSS will also be involved. Development in other languages and frameworks such as R, D3, and other visualization techniques are also encouraged as new projects emerge.

This position has been made possible in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Infrastructure and Capacity Building grant and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• Demonstrable experience developing websites with content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Omeka required, including customization/development of add-ons
• Thorough understanding of front-end technologies, including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and related libraries
• Significant experience designing and building user interfaces for websites and/or web applications
• Demonstrable experience designing and developing responsive design websites
• Demonstrable awareness of and experience implementing web-accessibility standards and practices
• Knowledge of how to interact with RESTful APIs and their export formats (JSON, XML etc.)
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tools (such as git, GitHub, SVN etc.)
• Knowledge of database-driven web development using e.g. PHP, Rails, or Django, highly desirable
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills and the ability to formulate options, develop, and recommend solutions
• Demonstrable experience in open-source development practices and workflows, preferably within an academic or non-profit environment
• Excellent oral and written skills, ability to communicate with technical and non-technical individuals, and prepare project documentation
• Experience with and commitment to participatory design processes and inclusive, community-oriented software development practices
• Experience with developing and leading workshops and individual consultations desirable

About the Digital Scholarship Group

A recognized leader in the field, the Digital Scholarship Group supports digital modes of research, publication, and collaboration through applied research, systems and tools development, and consultative services. Our team engages with faculty in the digital humanities and quantitative social sciences from across the university, and has become an essential partner for the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks, as well as cultural heritage partners in Boston, including the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Public Library.  Current DSG projects include the Boston Research Center, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project,the Early Carribean Digital Archive, and TEI Archiving Publishing and Access Service (TAPAS), as well as a number of digital archiving projects from the Library’s Archives and Special Collections. The DSG offers a friendly and closely collaborative work environment, and actively fosters the professional and intellectual development of all of our colleagues and collaborators, including training opportunities and mentorship.

The Northeastern University Library supports the mission of the University by working in partnership with the University community to develop and disseminate new scholarship. The Library fosters intellectual and professional growth, enriches the research, teaching, and learning environment, and promotes the effective use of knowledge by managing and delivering information resources and services to library users.

Northeastern University is an equal opportunity employer, seeking to recruit and support a broadly diverse community of faculty and staff.  Northeastern values and celebrates diversity in all its forms and strives to foster an inclusive culture built on respect that affirms inter-group relations and builds cohesion. 

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply and will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability status, or any other  characteristic protected by applicable law.

To learn more about Northeastern University’s commitment and support of diversity and inclusion, please see www.northeastern.edu/diversity.