Surveying the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering Landscape

In 2020, DHTech ran a survey to better understand who is developing code in the digital humanities, including what technologies they use, what formal and informal training they have, and their career expectations and experiences. To understand how the environment for research software engineering practitioners in DH has changed, we repeated the survey in 2025. For DH2025, we submitted this poster that presents the survey results. We retainined some of the original survey questions to enable longitudinal comparisons. This enables us to compare the prevalence of different programming languages and frameworks, the types of technical work that DH developers undertake, and where and in what kinds of teams DH development happens institutionally now versus in 2020. We have also added several new questions to better understand the careers of DH research software engineers and those doing research software engineering work. These new questions include topics such as research output, the disciplines in which DH developers typically work, advancement opportunities, motivations for working within digital humanities, compensation, DH RSE engagement in professional organizations, and code review practices across the community.