The Center of Digital Humanities Research seeks to hire a Graduate Research Assistant for Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 to work on a SSHRC-funded partner grant called “Text Mining the Novel,” or “NovelTM”. This will be a 9-month appointment, and the GAR will report to the director, Dr. Laura Mandell, while also coordinating with collaborators at McGill University, Stanford University, the University of Illinois, the University of Chicago, the University of Alberta, Harvard, and Guelph University.
Research will focus on “big data” investigations of the novel, particularly using topic modeling, data mining, and natural language processing tools in order to analyze and visualize aspects of the early novels found in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. The ideal student will have some familiarity with the emerging field of Digital Humanities. Ideal but not required are familiarity with or the desire to learn: text encoding, Mallet, R, Python, data visualization techniques, statistical analysis, feminism, intersectionality, minority literatures, or postcolonial theory. The GAR whom we hire need not have knowledge of these things at the outset but must be highly motivated to learn to create data sets and interrogate them in multiple ways; Dr. Mandell will help with statistics and visualization. This Research Assistant will be a co-author on papers published by the NovelTM group in the forthcoming Journal of Cultural Analytics.
People who feel math phobia and technophobia when reading this description are especially encouraged to apply: all one needs is a willingness to learn! It is a goal of the CoDHR to help Humanities Graduate Students learn new quantitative methodologies while thinking critically about them and their results.
This is a graduate research position as defined by the University, and GARs will be required to work an average of 20 hours per week. Tuition waivers will not be provided for Master’s students, per CLA policy, and potential tuition waivers for PhD students will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
To apply send a cover letter and CV to codhr@tamu.edu
Deadline is March 19, 2019
SSHRC stands for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: it is Canada’s equivalent of the NEH in the U.S.