PhD Researcher Innovating Cross-media Research on Public Debates

Are you looking for a challenging job in a dynamic setting? The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture  currently has a vacant  PhD position in the area of innovating cross media research on public debates. This Research School is one of the five within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research .

We are looking for a PhD candidate for Twi-XL . This interdisciplinary project aims to develop an innovative data infrastructure that enables students and researchers in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) to systematically examine current and emerging public debates on crucial societal issues in the Netherlands. The project is funded by the Platform Digital Infrastructure of the Dutch SSH-council and developed in a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam (UvA), University of Groningen (RUG), SURFsara, National Library of the Netherlands (KB), and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV). The project is led by Prof. Julia Noordegraaf.

Public debate and information exchange, as well as related problems of misinformation, polarization, and radicalization, are increasingly articulated online through social media platforms. This affects the media landscape as a whole: social media activity largely takes shape in response to mass media reporting, which, in turn, is progressively affected by online discourse. Hence, for a healthy democratic system, it is vital that researchers and public institutions can monitor the evolving dynamics of mediated public debate. Currently, however, researchers do not have access to comprehensive sets of social media data and readily searchable collections of mass media reporting, nor do they have effective tools for cross-media research at their disposal. Twi-XL will facilitate such research, aligning with the first VSNU Digital Society Programme Line ‘Citizenship & Democracy’.

What are you going to do

Together with a postdoc in this project, you will develop proof-of-concept research projects on prominent societal issues (2020-2025), drawing on Dutch language collections of social media and web data—Twitter, YouTube, blogs, websites — radio and television broadcasts and newspaper reports. Combining hyperlink and comparative content analysis, these collections enable innovative cross-media research on issues such as refugees & migration, MeToo, and climate change. Through this research, you will produce infrastructural requirements and demonstration scenarios and tutorials for other SSH researchers as well as academic publications of the results. In addition, you will contribute to building the Twi-XL infrastructure in close collaboration with developers from SURFSara, KB and NISV. This infrastructure will enable cross-media research through customized Jupyter notebooks.

Tasks and responsibilities:

• Submission of a PhD thesis within the period of appointment.
• Conducting cross-media research on Dutch language collections of social media and web data, radio and television broadcasts, and newspaper reports with Python or R via Jupyter notebooks to create proof of concept of this approach.
• Presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences and publishing at least one peer reviewed article.
• Collaborate with tool developers in building the Twi-XL infrastructure by providing requirements and testing specific components;
• Developing customized Juypter notebooks enabling cross-media research.
• Organize workshops, teaching SSH researchers and students to do cross-media research using Jupyter notebooks.
• Participating in meetings of the project research group and assisting the project coordinator in communication tasks (co-managing social media account and website, writing blog posts).
• Teach courses at bachelor’s and/or assist at Master’s level in the 2nd and 3rd year (0,2 FTE per year).
• Participation in the Research School and Faculty of Humanities PhD training programmes.