[Corpora-List] Two posdoc positions in Digital Humanities/Computational Linguistics at University of Amsterdam

[Bod, Rens]

Two posdoc positions in Digital Humanities/Computational Linguistics at University of Amsterdam
Starting date: 1 March 2012

See http://www.uva.nl/vacatures/vacatures.cfm/447DAFE1-1098-4F19-9D7E6A4EDE4B7FEE

2 Postdocs in Digital Humanities/Computational Linguistics
1.0 FTE (38 hours per week, for 2 years)
vacancy number W11-208

You are interested in the development and application of digital methods in the humanities. Digital research corpora of literature, art, music and language are changing the humanities in a spectacular way, leading to new questions that seemed unanswerable until very recently. The Digital Humanities or e-Humanities transcend the individual humanities disciplines, and you will need to be at home in more than one discipline.

Tasks
The postdoctoral researchers will execute their research projects within the broader context of the research field and will occasionally be called upon to participate in teaching and supervision tasks. The researchers will cooperate with other members of the field that have backgrounds in various relevant fields, and contribute to organizing an international conference. Furthermore, candidates are expected actively to apply for external funding related to the research priority area.

We welcome applications in all fields of Digital Humanities. We particularly welcome applications that fit within the following two project themes:

Postdoc project theme 1: Corpus Creation and Games
People experience language, literature, music, art, film, and games more and more through digital devices that allow, in principle, for monitoring their experiences and responses. This state of affairs opens up completely new ways of collecting data on how people experience language and the cultural products traditionally studied in the humanities. This postdoc project theme is about conceptualizing simple but attractive applications for the web, smartphones and tablets, with the goal of collecting data on important open questions in the humanities (for instance, on the relation between language and music). The candidate will have good programming skills, knowledge of techniques used in the game industry, and creative ideas about how they can be applied to answer open questions from the academic disciplines that study language, literature, music, art or film.

Postdoc project theme 2: Literary Quality
Literary quality is one of the most fascinating issues in literary studies. Scholars have found that social and cultural factors play an important role in the acceptance of a fictional work as literary or non-literary and as good or bad. This project theme will research whether formal characteristics of a text also play a role in readers' decisions to call a fictional text literary or non-literary, and good or bad. It will integrate the analysis of low-level lexical-statistical features and high-level syntactic and narrative features. This project is especially intended to investigate literary quality across different languages, by using techniques such as Data-Oriented Parsing. It will be carried out in close collaboration with the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The candidate will have a background in literary studies or (computational) linguistics, and will have programming skills and knowledge of natural language processing.

Requirements
■Completed Doctoral degree in a relevant field;
■Publications in peer-reviewed journals or with established academic publishers;
■Excellent academic writing and presentation skills;
■Excellent social and organizational skills;
■Experience with external fundraising is an advantage.

Further information
For further information about the position and the field of Digital Humanities contact rens.bod at uva.nl, or the Faculty’s research department at onderzoek-fgw at uva.nl.

Appointment
The Postdoc positions will be on a temporary basis for the period of two years. The starting date will be March 1st 2012 at the latest. The gross monthly salary will be between € 3195 and 4374 (‘Onderzoeker 3’; salary scale 11, according to the collective labour agreement Dutch universities) in the case of a full-time position (38 hours/week). Depending on experience and date of completion of the PhD an appointment as ‘Onderzoeker 4’ (between € 2379 and € 3755; salary scale 10, according to the collective labour agreement Dutch universities) may (initially) be necessary. A contract of 0.8 fte is possible as well. Secondary benefits at Dutch universities are attractive and include holiday pay and an end of year bonus.

Job application
Applications including a cover letter, complete academic CV, and project proposal (maximum 1800 words in length) should be submitted at the latest on Monday November 28th  2011, 08.00 hrs.
Please send your documents to onderzoek-fgw at uva.nl. Interviews with selected candidates will be held in the afternoon of Monday December 19th 2011.
Please state the vacancy number and ‘strictly confidential’ in the upper left corner of the envelope or in the subject field of your e-mail.
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