PhD positions CLCG (2.0 FTE)

Applications are invited for two fully funded, four-year PhD positions within the research project “Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models” (GOLEM), financed by an ERC Starting Grant and coordinated by the Principal Investigator (PI), dr. Federico Pianzola.

Millions of stories are shared on online platforms such as Wattpad, AO3, and Fanfiction.net, combined with readers' reactions and comments on these stories. The GOLEM project will analyze stories and their responses gathered from sites in five different languages – English, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Indonesian. This analysis can provide a wealth of information about the characters in a story, the genre, what a story is about, how a story is constructed, what themes are covered, as well as what readers from different countries and cultures find important in a story.

What elements in a story are meaningful to the reader? What makes a story get read, and what do readers value in a story? The information we collect with this research makes it possible, with the help of computer models, to find answers to these kinds of questions. The goal is to test hypotheses about cultural evolution and develop a methodology that can also be applied to books from other periods in history. In this way, we can study the evolution of fiction over the centuries, and gain unprecedented insight into something as old as humanity itself: storytelling
The project will hire two PhD students, who will work together with the PI and two postdocs. The PhDs will work principally in Groningen but will spend some time in South Korea or Indonesia for field work.

This PhD project offers a unique opportunity to work in an international research environment as well as to acquire valuable teaching experience: the PhD candidate is expected to conduct 0.24 fte teaching during the second, third and fourth year of their appointment (0.08 fte yearly).

The PhD Project
In collaboration with the other team members, you will work on your own multilingual and cross-cultural research project. The project is very interdisciplinary, combining computational methods for the analysis of culture and psychometric experiments with readers. The focus will be on changes over a time span of 20 years in how people write (fanfiction) stories, in terms of themes, tropes, and style. In parallel, you will also look at how these changes influence the reception of stories. You will learn skills related to database management, linked data, data science, machine learning, and experimental design for reading research.
You will be asked to:

- complete a dissertation on linguistic and aesthetic changes over time in online fanfiction. The dissertation may take the form of a book or a series of (co-authored) journal articles, in English
- collect data from websites independently as well as together with the principal investigator and other team members
- co-organize small-scale, targeted reading experiments in one case-study area (South Korea, Indonesia)
- co-organize research meetings within the Center for Language and Cognition and the Center for Digital Humanities
- contribute to the project’s public outreach and social media activities
- participate, limitedly, in the teaching as part of the regular curriculum of Digital Humanities and Communication and Information Science.