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Open position at ILLC: Data research analyst

Deadline: Friday 24 February 2017
Publication date
9 January 2017
Level of education
University
Salary indication
€2,552 to €4,028 gross per month, based on 38 hours per week
Closing date
20 January 2017
Hours
30,4 hours per week
Vacancy number
17-009

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a renowned research institute at the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science collaborate. The research carried out at Humanities forms one of the six research schools within this faculty. ILLC’s central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Research at ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, philosophy, linguistics, musicology, mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

The ILLC is looking to fill a position for a Data research analyst within the project Golden Agents: Creative Industries and the Making of the Dutch Golden Age. This is a 5-year NWO Groot project (2017-2021) funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and carried out by a consortium consisting of a large number of universities, research institutes and national cultural heritage institutions such as the Rijksmuseum, the National Library of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Institute for History of Art.

Golden Agents aims to build a large digital humanities research infrastructure. More specifically, we connect a number of (at present) independent databases within a unified semantic infrastructure in an intelligent way. The infrastructure is based on one single conceptual model, and is geared to the sustainable use and benefit of researchers in art history, social-economic history, cultural history and book & archival studies. Researchers in these fields will be able to pose queries across a wide variety of datasets related to publishers and consumers of the creative industries in the Dutch Golden Age. This enables multi-perspective, cross-disciplinary and comprehensive studies that are currently nigh impossible. Technically, the project will combine semantic web with multi-agent technology to enable the analysis of interactions between producers and consumers of the different forms of art of the Dutch Golden Age.

The Golden Agents consortium team involves experts in computer science and digital humanities (artificial intelligence and related applied logics, knowledge representation, especially semantic web ontologies and related applied logics; cultural history, history of art and archival studies) appointed in Amsterdam (Huygens ING, Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam or the City Archives of Amsterdam), Utrecht and other Dutch cities.

A short description of the project can be found at:

Job description

The Data research analyst works in principle within Workpackage 1 (Meta)data and RDF representations), in a team led by Gertjan Filarski at Huygens ING (Amsterdam). The team includes specialists based at the Amsterdam City Archives, in particular a data curator and a typologist, and at VU University (advisor: Rinke Hoekstra, Computer Science, Knowledge Representation group). The Data research analyst will be formally employed at the University of Amsterdam and, for optimal cooperation, logistically hosted in the centre of Amsterdam close to the team led by Arianna Betti (Philosophy, Workpackage 2 leader & Head of Concepts in Motion Group at University of Amsterdam, as well as at a walking distance both to the City Archives and Huygens ING. The tasks of the Data research analyst are:

  • design and manage a pipeline to process and transform indexes, and semi-automated generated unstructured data from one specific database to the linked data infrastructure; the database in question is Golden Agent’s largest, the collection of notary acts from the City Archives of Amsterdam (Stadsarchief);
  • collaborate closely with the developers of ontologies working inside and outside the City Archives (Stadsarchief) in the Golden Agents project, in particular with the Semantic Lead in Workpackage 2 and other ICT specialists in Workpackage 1;
  • collaborate with the Workpackage 4 (dissemination) team led by Charles van der Heuvel (Main Leader of the Golden Agents project) and contribute to papers, reports, and proper documentation for software releases.

The appointment is for one year with the possibility of extension for a further three years. The position announced in this call is based in Amsterdam. We plan to host the position at the Department of Philosophy, and embed them in the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC).

Requirements

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Sciences or Archival Studies with focus on Semantic Web technologies;
  • experience with working with W3C standards such as RDF, SPARQL, JSON-LD, and with ontologies;
  • experience with Java and other relevant programming languages (ASP, Perl, PHP, Python, etc);
  • experience with Web technologies;
  • strong cooperative attitude and willingness to engage in collaborative research;
  • excellent command of English, and preferably at least one other language;
  • previous experience within interdisciplinary projects involving a number of diverse partners, and geared to humanities infrastructure and/or supporting the work of humanities researchers is a strong advantage;
  • affinity with the humanities disciplines involved in the project (art, literature, theatre studies, book studies, and history, especially social-economic history and law), in the Golden Age in particular from 17th century, but also beyond, is a strong advantage;
  • understanding of archival standards such as EAD and of artificial intelligence program languages is an advantage.

Knowledge and understanding of GLAM-standards (especially library and archive standards) such as FRBRoo, VIAF, BIBFRAME, FRAD, FRSAD etc, as well as knowledge and understanding of TEI, is an advantage.

Further information

For more information on the Data research analyst position, and the Golden Agents research project in general, please contact:

and/or

Appointment

The selected candidates will be appointed part-time (30.4 hours per week) at the at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, starting as soon as possible and up to four years. The work will be carried out under the aegis of ILLC. The appointment is initially for a period of 12 months; contingent on satisfactory performance it will be extended up to a further three years for a total of four years. The gross monthly salary (on a full-time basis) will range from €2,552 to €4,028 (scale 10 and 11), depending on experience and qualifications, and in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.

Job application

Applications should include the following information in one single pdf file (not zipped), named using the applicant’s surname and 'DataResearchAnalyst' as file name, e.g.: GoldenAgents-Fisher- DataResearchAnalyst.pdf:

  1. A cover statement of maximum two A4 pages motivating why you are applying and how you can contribute to the Golden Agents project in terms of (a) creativity and effectiveness in software design and implementation; (b) cooperative research; and (c) experience and know-how; in particular, include a description of your experience, if any, with designing and realizing fallbacks in a comparable project setup (please provide concrete examples);
  2. CV, including (a) details of studies, background and relevant experience; (b) names and e-mail addresses of at least two referees to be contacted for references; (c) full list of relevant output (papers, software, software documentation, reports;
  3. URLs for downloading two output pieces (e.g. sample publications, software documentation, theses, etc) that you have selected for their representativeness for the position. Please add a brief motivation for your selection (do not send the two pieces as part of your application).

Applicants must have completed their MA by the time of the closing date of this call.

Please submit your application no later than 20 January 2017 at 12:00 hours to . Only complete applications submitted to this email address will be considered.

Please state vacancy number 17-009 subject line of your application. The subject of the e-mail message and the attachment must consist of the vacancy number and the text '[GoldenAgents-applicant's last name-ResearchDataAnalyst'.

At the moment, interviews are planned on 31 January 2017 and 2 February 2017. Latest 24 January 2017 selected candidates will receive further information as to the procedure and planned interviews. The appointment will start as soon as possible.

Please note that this newsitem has been archived, and may contain outdated information or links.