When PhD students lie awake at night, what occupies their thoughts, apart from the all-consuming PhD research work? Many worry about their future. What do people with PhDs in the arts and humanities do after they graduate? Many have ambitions of continuing their research. They have attended conferences and talked to scholars they respect; they might have seen it happen in their families, or to relatives or close friends.

When I was a PhD student, particularly during my first two, very naïve years, I assumed that the post-doc route was the logical, expected one. I had seen it happen to others. I had heard of it, read about it. You did post-docs, then you got a job.

But reality then comes and gets you with a vengeance, and many dreams and illussions are broken. One realises that the post-doc route is not for everyone, that the field is defined by the opacity of the unsaid, unshared know-how, and that in spite of the incredible good will of many supervisors and academic administrators alike, opportunities for recent PhD graduates are more than limited.

This is often common knowledge. "That's the way it is", those in the know tell you. Scholars and students are aware that not all universities are born equal, and that therefore not all PhD students are born equal. Nevertheless it helps to look at the evidence and wonder. This means asking questions from the existing data: it is often there, on the surface, and one simply needs to dig a bit. One does not even need sophisticated tools to do it. The time and disposition to do it come at a price, though.

Once again, the conundrum (or is it an aporia?) of Higher Education, and of scholarly research in particular, is centred on the series of conditions necessitated to carry out or participate of such endeavor. These conditions are often taken for granted by those who have enjoyed them for as far back as they can remember, and it is also easy to forget the days in which having the time to look at something closely was indeed a very expensive, often unaffordable luxury.

The time and series of conditions required to even look at which postdoctoral opportunities are available, let alone the time it takes to apply for them (these are often two or three-tiered processes that can take months of preparation and patient waiting) are just two of the features that play a role in who gets awarded funding to get their foot on the professional playing field.

This project aims to be an open work in progress. I aim to use this platform as a public research platform where gradually I will share some findings from research I have been doing on postdoctoral fellowship opportunities in the United Kingdom. I was partly inspired by personal experiences, conversations with colleagues on Twitter and my recent data collection experiences, both at Altmetric and 4Humanities (particularly "The Humanities Matter!" Infographic, 2013).

I will start by sharing some charts I have done from the data I have collected. I will hopefully be able to go on adding new sections, and come back and edit any text I manage to compose to add links and references.

This project also has a meta-intention, that of giving Scalar a go, see in which ways it differs from existing blogging platforms, and to be part of the growing community of scholars starting to use it to share their research.

I have started sharing some charts form the data I have collected from recent British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship awards, those granted between 2008 and 2012.