Research Associate, London
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Inserito il 01/10/2013
from digitalhumanities.org
Research Associate in Big Social Data
Department of Digital Humanities
School of Arts & Humanities
Reference Number: R6/AAV/967/13-MK
Grade 6, £31,331 - £35,244 per annum,
plus £2,323 London allowance per annum
To email: recruitmentteam3@kcl.ac.uk
Applications should be made electronically in Word or PDF format.
Please ensure you quote reference number R6/AAV/967/13-MK on all
correspondence.
Informal enquiries may be made to Tobias Blanke on 020 7848 1975, or via
email at tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk.
Closing date: 17 October 2013
The Department is seeking a Research Associate in dynamic web and mobile
development including implementation of front-end interfaces with an
interest in working in big social data. The Researcher will work on an AHRC
Big Data funded research project called ĀOur data, ourselvesĀ.
Collectively, we now create more data in two days than we did in all of
2002. Whether it is the 4 Billion pieces of content shared daily on
Facebook, the 200 Million tweets, more than 5 Billion of us intensively
produce unprecedented and unfathomable amounts of social data whenever we
text, browse, post or generate content on our phones. We call this Big
Social Data (BSD), and it entails the symbolic content we generate as will
as the metadata our phones emit, tracking our bodies through time and space.
Recent revelations about the NSA and GCHQ reveal just how data centric our
society has become. The project 'Our Data, Ourselves' seeks to democratise
BSD. We seek to turn it into a community asset and develop tools,
applications, formats and practices which will enable important new research
on and using BSD by arts and humanities researchers. We will partner with
youth coders in the Young Rewired State network as co-researchers, and gain
privileged insight into how the mediated connectedness manifested by BSD is
transforming communities. We will work with our young co- researchers to
develop tools and applications for the capture, storage, and analysis of
BSD, primarily from mobile phones. We will create an open environment for
BSD research and develop an ethical framework for data sharing available for
widespread community use. We envision a BSD research commons, respectful of
privacy concerns, and engaging young tech-savvy communities to gain a
greater understanding of the data-intensive digital culture of mobile
environments.
We develop a freely accessible, open source online market place for tools
and applications enabling the extraction of BSD from smart phones. We engage
in hackathons to develop these tools, and engage privacy concerns,
developing anonymisation technologies and produce policy white papers on
ethical data sharing. We seek to turn BSD, which is currently primarily
fodder for targeted ads and surveillance into a community resource available
for creative use. If it is 'our data ourselves', our BSD commons will
empower us to use it in new ways, both in community and by arts and
humanities researchers.
The successful candidate for this position will be a web/mobile platforms
researcher with experience in sophisticated public facing applications. The
post-holder will have excellent knowledge of scripting languages such as PHP
and Python and web-development technologies (Javascript, CSS, HTML5).
Knowledge of the Andriod platform would be an advantage, too. They will need
to be able to work effectively as part of a multi-disciplinary team, as well
as to work independently.
Experience with collaborative development around open-source code-hosting
repositories (such as Github, Bitbucket or Google Code) would be an
advantage.
The post is for 16 months and is a full time appointment. The post holder
will be based at the Drury Lane site but the post will involve some travel
to meet with the communities involved.
