AAA Data Science Postdoctoral researcher in Digital Humanities

Faculty of Humanities (VU) & Faculty of Humanities (UvA)

Amsterdam Data Science, an initiative of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU University Amsterdam (VU), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is looking for 14 researchers at the postdoctoral/PhD level. These positions are funded by the Amsterdam Academic Alliance (AAA), a joint initiative of the UvA and VU aimed at intensifying collaboration with each other and knowledge institutions in the region, to cement Amsterdam's position as a hub of academic excellence. These positions are partially co-funded by CWI, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the UvA, HvA, ORTEC, Spinoza fund of Prof. Vossen, and VUmc.

Amsterdam Data Science provides a network in which some 300 Amsterdam based scientists exchange Data Science knowledge and forge partnerships within and outside the academic community. This comprises the foundations of data science and data science for the life sciences, social analytics, business analytics, and digital humanities.

This advertisement concerns one of the 14 positions. This postdoctoral researcher position is with Prof. Bod of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam and with Prof. Leemans of the Faculty of Humanities, VU University. 

The Faculties of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam and of VU University Amsterdam offer a postdoc position on a Digital Humanities project that will involve close collaboration between the two universities and between the humanities and computer science. The postdoc will collaborate in the new Digital Humanities research group 'QuPiD2: Quality and Perspectives in Deep Data', a project that is part of the Amsterdam Academic Alliance Data Science Program. The Digital Humanities postdoc will be connected to the Network Institute at VU University and with the Center  for Digital Humanities at UvA. 

Project description

80% of digital data is in unstructured textual form. Textual data is rich and complex. Not only does it contain massive amounts of statements but, more importantly, it also reflects our perspective on these statements: our emotions, opinions, the interpersonal, as well as the current social debate. Textual data is therefore not only big but it is also deep, adding a multitude of complexity. This Digital Humanities project will model quality and perspectives in deep data. Together with a group of researchers (1 postdoc, 2 PhD’s) and a committed group of advisors from various disciplines, the postdoc of this project will help to deliver a framework for deep data representation that makes data provenance, quality and perspective explicit in the way such data is described and consumed. 

In this project, the postdoc will investigate long-term changes of perspectives and perception in cultural texts (fiction, biographies, pedagogical texts, journals, newspapers and encyclopedias), through emotion analysis, topic modeling, and genre analysis. By elaborating on data sets and NLP techniques that have recently been developed in other projects, the postdoc will cluster, classify and interpret different perspectives on topics that feature in currently available machine-readable Dutch texts from 1600-2000.

Requirements

The postdoctoral researcher for this project should have a PhD in a Humanities discipline (linguistics, history, arts, literature, culture) with an interest for long term perspectives and textual culture. This project requires a strong background in digital humanities (preferably in natural language processing). As the project is set up as a close collaboration between scholars from various disciplines, the postdoc should have ample social skills and a flexible attitude towards work environments.

Further information

• Prof. Rens Bod, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Faculty of Humanities & Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam
• Prof. Inger Leemans, Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, VU University Amsterdam

Appointment

The appointment will be on a temporary basis for a period of three years. Based on a full-time appointment (38 hours per week) the gross monthly salary will range from €2,476 to €3,908 (scale 10) depending on expertise and previous experience. The salary is supplemented with a holiday allowance of 8% and an end-of-year bonus of 8.3%. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

Job application

Applications may only be submitted via solliciteren2015-fgw@uva.nl. To process your application immediately, please quote vacancy number 15-116 and the position you are applying for in the subject-line. Applications must include a detailed curriculum vitae, a motivation letter explaining why you are the right candidate, list of projects you have worked on with brief descriptions of your contributions and the names and contact addresses of two academic references from which information about the candidate can be obtained. All these should be grouped in one PDF attachment.

Applications will be accepted until 10 May 2015.

No agencies please