News and Events: Open Positions

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Research project assistants (Internal vacancy) at the Faculty of Humanities

Deadline: Sunday 25 June 2017
Publication date
19 June 2017
Level of education
University
Salary indication
€2,709 to €3,722 gross per month, based on 38 hours per week
Closing date
25 June 2017
Hours
22,8 hours per week
Vacancy number
17-333

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 one or more positions for (a) Project Assistants in Arianna Betti’s group Concepts in Motion within the projects eIdeas (2017-2022, VICI) and CatVis (2015-2019, Public-Private Partnership), both funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). eIdeas (PI Arianna Betti) aims at developing a groundbreaking new computational methodology for the History of Ideas, and is carried out by a team of philosophers and historians of logic, mathematics and biology working on Wolff, Kant, Bolzano, Frege, Russell and Quine, and computational experts in NLP (especially distributional semantics), text-mining and ontologies. CatVis (PIs Arianna Betti and Bettina Speckmann) aims at developing insightful visualisations for the humanities based on cutting edge geometrical algorithmics, and is carried out by a consortium formed by Arianna Betti’s philosophy group at ILLC, Bettina Speckmann’s computer science group in Eindhoven, OCLC (the US company behind WorldCat) and the eScience center.

A short description of the projects can be found here

Project description

We are looking for a Research Assistant (RA) to support our NWO-projects eIdeas (VICI) and CatVis (Public-Private Consortium). The ideal candidate is a born organiser: a flexible, accurate, highly team-oriented person, capable of working independently, of quickly adjusting to changes of plan, with outstanding social and communicative skills. The RA supports the internal and the external workings of the Concept in Motion team by monitoring and taking care of the more practical and collaborative aspects of its  internal workings, as well as of its external, digital presence in the internet. The main tasks of the RA fall into four categories:

  1. Data collection and elaboration;
  2. ICT and social media technical support;
  3. Personal Assistantship & PR;
  4. Research Assistantship proper. 

The tasks include, but are not limited to, corpus-building for eIdeas and CatVis (collecting digital sources and metadata, OCR-processing and managing the resources thus built, data cleaning), updating the website creatively, finding relevant literature for papers in philosophy and digital humanities, proofreading documents, (co)organizing events (such as conferences and research meetings), taking minutes, drafting reports, booking tickets, answering e-mails, updating and setting up (simple) budgets, and do basic PR using social media creatively and resourcefully. ICT tasks are geared towards the use and adaptation of research team tools such as Zotero, Basecamp and Slack and their integration with social media. This involves mashups, simple scripting, and investigating user forums for solutions. We also need assistance with non-trivial installation of software, including new software developed within the group itself.

By working closely with a diverse, interdisciplinary and dynamic research group as a Research Assistant you will receive valuable direct and indirect research training, and develop skills which are relevant for a future career in academia. Depending on qualifications and entity of contributions, you might be invited to co-author original papers. Moreover, this job enables you to enlarge your network, since you are expected to take active part in the (inter)national events and meetings that you (co-)organise, as well as (co)representing the group to various events, for instance by presenting posters.

Given the diversity of the tasks to be carried out, this position will be likely split among two or more people.

Requirements

  • Minimally, a BA in philosophy or other field relevant to the project;
  • previous experience with similar tasks in similar research group environments;
  • knowledge of reference software (such as Mendeley and Zotero);
  • scripting abilities and experience with HTML or similar (or the willingness to learn this independently);
  • experience with social media, including creative (micro)blogging;
  • outstanding social, organisational & communicative skills;
  • being able and willing to work in a team and an interdisciplinary setting
  • excellent, preferably near-native, English. Knowledge of German is an advantage.

Our team is international, diverse, gender-balanced and flexible as regards working times, habits and team organisation.

We aim to start the position no later than 21 July 2017, preferably earlier.

Further information

For additional information please contact:

Appointment

The selected candidates will be appointed for a maximum of 22,8 hours per week starting as soon as possible, and up to four years at the at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. 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 total of four years. The gross monthly salary (on a full-time basis) will range from €2,709 to € 3,722 gross per month (scale 9) depending on experience and qualifications, and in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.
Location: Amsterdam.

Job application

Only candidates with an employment at UvA can apply for this vacancy.

Applications should include the following information in one single pdf file (not zipped), named using the PI name, applicant’s surname and “ResearchAssistant” as file name, e.g.: Betti-Fisher-ResearchAssistant.pdf:

  1. A cover statement of maximum one A4 pages motivating why you are applying and how you can contribute to the project(s) in terms of (a) teamwork; and (b) experience and know-how;
  2. CV, including (a) details of studies, background and relevant experience; (b) full list of relevant output (papers, software, software documentation, reports). Names of referees to be contacted are not necessary at this point but might be included.

Applicants must have completed or nearly completed their BA by the time of the closing date of this call.

Please submit your application to solliciteren2017-FGW@uva.nl no later than 23.59 (CEST) on 25 June 2017. Only complete applications submitted to this email address will be considered.

Please state vacancy number 17-333 in the subject line of your application. The subject of the e-mail message and the attachment must consist of the vacancy number and the text '[Betti-applicant's last name-ResearchAssistant]'.

At the moment, interviews are planned on 3, 4 and 5 July 2017. Latest 27 June 2017 selected candidates will receive further information as to the procedure and planned interviews. The appointment will start as soon as possible. #LI-DNP

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