Vacancies

Research Associate—GLOSSAM project

College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Ref. No. 010478

JOB DESCRIPTION

The successful candidate will explore the application of Data Science methods, in particular Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning, to the analysis of historical texts.

Glosses are short texts that provide a running commentary on other (primary) texts, and are usually found written between the lines or in the margins of medieval manuscripts (handwritten books). This project focuses on manuscripts from the eighth and ninth centuries AD, where the primary texts are usually in Latin, and glosses are written in Latin, Old Irish and other historical languages. The corpus of texts for this project may be found in Gloss Corpus (http://www.glossing.org/glosscorpus), currently containing around 32,000 glosses and still expanding.

Glosses are often not unique, and different manuscripts containing the same primary texts often contain glosses in the same locations with the same or similar wording. However, this material presents serious challenges for Humanities researchers, since 1) a manuscript may contain potentially thousands of glosses, making traditional analysis extremely slow and complex; 2) the textual relationships between different glossed manuscripts are often very complex and not easy to summarise.

The researcher will explore cutting-edge Data Science methods to address these challenges. They will be supported by the project team, who will supply textual content and advise on its interpretation. The researcher will develop new techniques for interpreting historical cultural texts, including texts in under- resourced languages (Old Irish in particular).

Duties:

Producing statistical analyses for texts in Gloss Corpus (e.g. metrics and frequency distributions), with suitable visualisations where appropriate.
Application of semantic word embeddings for Latin (and potentially multilingual, including Old Irish) texts. Assisting with the development of associated web applications (e.g. semantic search, text similarity search).
Application of sentence or document embeddings to entire glosses. Analysis of semantic overlap across different collections of glosses, using text clustering analysis or similar, and visualisations where appropriate.
Assisting with the development of the Gloss Corpus web resource.
Regular collaboration with the project team, contributing ideas and helping to solve data-related project challenges.
Presenting the results of research at seminars and conferences.
Publishing the results of research in quality peer-reviewed journals for Data Science and/or Digital Humanities research.
Any other duties assigned commensurate to this level of post.

Salary: Research Associate/Postdoctoral Researcher salary scale €42,782 - €54,965 per annum, (subject to the project’s funding limitations), and pro rata for shorter and/or part-time contracts.

The default position for all new public sector appointments is the 1st point of the salary scale. This may be reviewed, and consideration afforded to appointment at a higher point on the payscale (subject to the project’s funding limitations), where evidence of prior years’ equivalent experience is accepted in determining placement on the scale above point 1, subject to the maximum of the scale. (Research Salary Scales - University of Galway )

Closing date for receipt of applications is 17:00 (Irish Time) on 5 August 2024. It will not be possible to consider applications received after the closing date.

Please review full job description for further details and essential requirements.

Download full job description: Full job description

To apply, see "Research Vacancies Type 2" on the University’s Jobs page.