It makes me wonder - are there opportunities for a digital hybrid of techie and historian? The data hoarder subreddits come to mind but they tend to be focused on tech itself or unfocused in what data they collect.
Though even if you could maintain and do analysis on a digitized archive of a specific subject I wonder what kind of market there is for that since that’s kind of what libraries have become?
The History job market now is not better than it was 2-3 years ago. If anything it's worse, and schools continue to pump out PhDs like it just doesn't matter that they're tricking kids into burning the better part of a decade for less than nothing (average time to complete in the US is 7-8 years!)
The new policy seems to be to throw the (digital) archives down the memory hole to avoid lawsuits.
Most people have incredibly strong attachments to (specific bits) of history. It's often be inseparable from culture, national identity, and religion. However, it's difficult to justify that funding politically over things like building another warship (to keep us safe!), building a supercomputer (to keep us innovative!), or subsidizing corporate entities (to save jobs!). There's also no commercial market for building national identity. Accordingly, most funding comes out of relatively small culture/arts budgets that don't have to answer directly to constituents, except for a very few things that meet the incredibly high bar of direct political support like the national parks and pyramids.
But if you're interested in how humans have adapted to climate change in the past, or how to design a resilient society, or how pandemics spread, you're going to need historical studies at some point.
People see themselves continuously as playing a role in a story than spans millenia. That's what "identity" is really about, and it underlies war, crime, achievement, religion, raising of families, etc.
Historians could be the leaders here, but for whatever reason they are not. Historians haven't put themselves in a position where they could guide human stories for society overall.
So do they have potential value? Yes. But either they aren't able to provide it, or we aren't able to accept it.
Instead we have media narratives, which are a sad substitute.
This area is called digital archival: https://ndsa.org/conference/ https://www.imaging.org/site/IST/Conferences/Archiving/IST/C...
I used to hate history, but it's much more interesting to read when compared against "common knowledge" of what people believe.
Guy I knew was doing some really cool history work around German settlers in early America based on data collected by early life insurance companies.
In many cases what is already digitized, much like what is shown at museums, is just the tip of the iceberg of information kept in non-digital forms.