Post-doc, Lancaster
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Inserito il 15/05/2016
You are invited to apply for a PhD studentship, funded for up to 3 years, commencing October 2016 (or sooner if possible). The studentship is linked to a Leverhulme Trust project which started in 2015 called “Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the Lake District” (http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/lakesdeepmap/) awarded to Dr Paul Rayson (School of Computing and Communications), Professor Ian Gregory (History), Professor Sally Bushell (English and Creative Writing) and Dr Christopher Donaldson (English Literature, University of Birmingham). Overall, the Leverhulme Trust project is developing new understandings of the literary and cultural geographies of one of Britain’s most significant cultural landscapes, the English Lake District, by applying ground-breaking, exploratory geographical methods to the interdisciplinary research field of the spatial humanities (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/spatialhum/). Bringing together researchers with complementary expertise in computer science, geographic information science (GISc), literary studies, and regional history, the project will create a step change in the way scholars engage with the geographies that inform regional identity and sense of place.
If your application is successful, you will join the UCREL research centre and based within the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, and be co-supervised by Dr Paul Rayson and Professor Ian Gregory. You will work within a long standing interdisciplinary team linking corpus-based natural language processing research with the spatial humanities.
Topic: The core of the PhD will be to develop a prototype deep map (envisaged as an intuitive, open-access web tool) that allows a range of user-groups to gain new understandings of the importance of space and place to Lake District heritage. Its core source will be the Corpus of Lake District writing – over 1.5 million words from texts written between 1622-1900 from which place-names have been extracted and geo-located. Deep mapping offers a new way to approach, understand and analyse the relationship between geography, history and literature through a variety of media that allows for full exploration of multiple layers of meaning in relation to the object of study.
The first question the thesis will explore is what new research processes are supported by the affordances of interactive deep map methods that combine spatial analysis, natural language processing (NLP) and corpus linguistics techniques? Second, how does one present this information to a wide range of user-groups in ways that make it accessible and understandable? Third, which interactive visualisation techniques best support these different user-groups? The user-groups in question include in particular: (1) scholars of literature, history, human geography and other subjects with an interest in the Lake District; (2) students studying these subjects; (3) the wider public including tourists and the local community and particularly organisations that serve these groups including museums and galleries, local heritage societies, the National Park Authority and Tourist Information Centres. We have good links to these organisations through Lancaster’s Regional Heritage Centre.
Academic Requirements: you must have an excellent degree in Computer Science, or closely related field. Experience of an MSc project in NLP, HCI, or any related area is desirable but not a requirement.
Funding: the Scholarship provides tuition fees (or partial fee waiver for overseas students) for a duration of 3 years; an annual stipend of £14,000.
Application Instructions: closing date for formal application is 31 May 2016 via the Postgraduate Admissions Portal (please mention this role when applying):
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/scc/postgraduate/postgraduate-research/scholarships/
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ANN068/phd-studentship/
Potential applicants should email to Paul Rayson (p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk>) or Ian Gregory (i.gregory@lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:i.gregory@lancaster.ac.uk>) for informal advice.
from "Humanist"
