East Asia-related Job Market Data Table (2020-2021)

Below you will find a table that presents a selection of the categories I am tracking as a part of my job data analyses. This table is intended to serve as a quick guide to job advertisements from the 2020-2021 season. I have tried to make my data as inclusive as possible, but there may inevitably be positions that I missed. For information on what sites I use to collect my data, visit last year’s data page and my guide to job sites for academics.

In the course of creating visualizations for East Asia-related academic job advertisements, many people asked if I was making my data available as I collected it, rather than just at the end of the year when I present annual trends and final numbers. My initial response was no. One reason is that I was not cleaning my data as I collected it, so I risked putting out incorrect or incomplete information. Another reason is that I felt torn about whether providing this information in one centralized place was more beneficial for its convenience or more detrimental, in that it might discourage job seekers from learning how to search for that information themselves. In the end, I’ve decided that the data can better serve the field by being accessible throughout the year. Job seekers will always have their own specific needs and interests that will drive their individual searches. Furthermore, the labor of putting this information together is already taking place and may as well be as useful to the field at large, particularly those in precarious positions, as possible.

About the Table

The table below is dynamic, updating as I input new information. I typically review new job postings once a week, though occasionally may add new advertisements as I see them. For ease of use, I have eliminated some categories from the table that will eventually feature in my year-end summary (public/private, mapped coordinates, and continental region).

I have created a table that includes a search bar where you can filter the content of the dataset. Similarly, there are up and down arrows to organize the presentation of the information prioritizing a specific category. Only want to see positions in Korea? Search ‘Korea’! The rest of the data will be filtered out.

For information on how I determine my data categories (data is not neutral!) and any abbreviations (such as TT for “tenure-track”), please visit last year’s data page. I have added one additional category to my job data in progress, which is the “Keywords” column. Here I will put some of the significant terms placed in each advertisement, which should help users filter based on their particular interests (e.g., “What jobs specified a specialist in ‘gender’ this year?”). Job seekers please note that even if a job does not ask for a particular specialization does not mean that they are not open to people who work in that area! So if you search by a keyword and don’t find it, that does not mean there are not job options out there for you.

For the 2020-2021 season I expanded my descriptions for some categories, notably “Desired Discipline.” So you will find new labels such as “Linguistics,” “Translation,” “Music/Musicology,” etc. that did not appear in the 2019-2020 data cycle.

I also added another column, “URL,” which links to the original advertisement. This comes with a couple important caveats: I do my best to provide links only to open access websites, but that might not always be possible. If you find that a particular link is behind some kind of membership wall, you might try Googling the job advertisement using the institution and keywords provided to see if the ad has been placed somewhere else or visiting the institution’s website to look for a formal HR posting. Similarly, many job postings either disappear after 30-90 days or after the position has filled. This means that a link you were able to access last week may not work this week! A frustrating feature of many of these advertisements, and part of the reason I collect data weekly rather than scraping data after the fact. So do not yell at me if you click a link and it no longer works, please!

If you do find the inevitable typo anywhere, though, please feel free to contact me and let me know.

If you found this table or any other projects and public-facing writing on my site useful, please consider regularly supporting me via Patreon . Coding and collecting this data takes hours (and lots of hair pulling over broken code!). I usually dedicate anywhere from 1-2 hours per week just on data collection, not including data cleaning. Digital projects can look fairly straightforward, but there is a lot of invisible labor that goes into it, which I do in my spare time. Support from the community I do this for means a lot to me and helps keep this site running. 🙂

An immense thank you to Paul Vierthaler for helping me wade through the deep end of jQuery to get this table functional and to the kind folks at the Yale DH Lab for their invaluable advice! Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.