Postdoc in Digital Humanities with focus on Historical Text Mining

Uppsala University is a comprehensive research-intensive university with a strong international standing. Our ultimate goal is to conduct education and research of the highest quality and relevance to make a long-term difference in society.

The Department of History of Science and Ideas is a dynamic research environment with strong profiles in history of science, intellectual history and history of medicine. It is Sweden’s largest centre for study within this field and is internationally renowned for its research.

Project description: ActDisease is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) with a Starting Grant (ERC-2021-STG 101040999). The project entails a large-scale digitization of patient organization periodicals and using various text mining technologies to analyze these sources. The particular features of this material and the research questions pose a number of challenges to text mining methods, ranging from its fragmented and multilingual nature to the analysis of relationships between different corpora and professional and lay spheres.

Besides the PI, the team consists of a research engineer and a research assistant supporting the digital infrastructure and analysis, two history postdocs, and one Digital Humanities postdoc (this position) working on methodological development for text mining in the history of science and medicine and fragmented and multilingual source materials.

Duties: This employment as postdoctoral researcher involves a two year full-time post with the possibility of one further year extension provided sufficient funds. The work consists of pursuing methodological development in the field of historical text mining, in close collaboration with the other members of the project team.

Requirements: PhD degree or a foreign degree equivalent to a PhD degree in a relevant field within the digital humanities, such as computational linguistics, natural language processing, or computer science. The degree needs to be obtained by the time of the decision of the employment. Those who have obtained a PhD degree three years prior to the application deadline are primarily considered for the employment. The starting point of the three-year frame period is the application deadline. The three year period can be extended due to circumstances such as sick leave, parental leave, duties in labour unions, etc. Excellent language skills in English are a requirement. Research experience in digital text analysis is a requirement.

Additional qualifications: Emphasis will primarily be placed upon academic merits in selecting candidates. Ranking will take place on the basis of the quality of the academic merits. Particular weight will be given to research completed within the field of historical text mining. Experience working in interdisciplinary research teams are an advantage. Knowledge of French, German, and/or Swedish are an advantage. Great importance will also be placed on the ability to work independently and personal suitability.

Please visit the University home page for more information on the project, position, and application procedure, by clicking the 'Apply' button.