Researcher in Digital Philology

Description

 Grade 7: £29,249 - £35,938 p.a.

The project is looking for a classics scholar and papyrologist who is also engaged in the Digital Humanities at the computational level.

The candidate is expected to take a leadership role in overseeing the development of an expert interface, through which professional scholars can access and conduct research on Ancient Lives data, and an innovative digital text-editing environment for unpublished material. Guiding and working closely with programming analysts that collaborate on the project will be the core day-to-day task. Ensuring the data flows into a propitious user interface for a professionally trained classicist and papyrologist is essential. And in order to build an expert system that assists papyrologists in editing fragments through automated natural language processing techniques, the candidate will be constantly translating their philological skill set into computational thinking to develop pseudo-logic for programming staff.

The role of Researcher in Digital Philology requires first a demonstrated ability in both literary and documentary papyrology, as well as training in textual criticism. The candidate will be editing papyrus fragments, and thus should already have edited texts at a scholarly level. Second, the candidate must also have the following computational skill set: knowledge of programming languages (esp. Ruby), MySQL, web development, and the methodology of crowdsourcing. In particular, prior experience developing and managing a significant Digital Humanities project is highly desired. Since Ancient Lives is an ongoing grant funded project, the candidate must also show a history of grant writing experience.

The closing date for applications is noon on 6 December 2012