CLS INFRA D4.1 Skills Gap Analysis

Lisanne M. Van Rossum, Artjoms Šeļa
2022 Zenodo  
The main task of this deliverable was to explore current gaps in teaching of research skills for computational literary studies to inform the CLS INFRA project's own approach to training schools and chart the territory to gain broader insight into current CLS teaching practices. We approached the task through an explicit mapping of 1) existing training opportunities ("supply") and 2) opinions of the practitioner community ("demand") to a single grid of skills, where it would be possible to
more » ... ify the gaps through comparison. From four broadly defined stages in a research cycle: 1) Theory and research setup, 2) Collection, 3) Analysis, 4) Delivery we derived 26 skills. To understand supply we have manually annotated current offers in a sample of European university courses in Digital Humanities and summer school workshops. To index demand we set up an online survey to ask the community to evaluate each skill from the grid based on its perceived future prospects in the field and teaching (1-5 scale response, 118 participants). After value normalization, areas of Analysis and Collection, especially advanced text modeling, classification, statistics, corpus building, and access to existing collections look undersaturated. Across Research setup the focus is on research design principles, while Delivery shows underrepresentation of knowledge on reproducibility. The survey also offered a chance to observe the demographic structure of the CLS community. Most of the responses came from early career researchers, indicating a new generational wave within computational literary studies. Participant gender was balanced, although more late career men than women were represented, and men were more represented in disciplines with technical backgrounds. Self-reported involvement in CLS and experience in computational skills was likewise on average lower for female participants. Researchers who work in the field of CLS also report more proficiency in computational methods, which suggests that these go hand in hand in current pra [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.6401858 fatcat:mxswns4iefaf7gmcttgoiuozeq