Data Engineer for digital humanities: Research Engineer position in Champs-sur-Marne (near Paris) or Grenoble

Starting date: October 01, 2021
Duration: full-time position for 24 months (with a possibility of reappointment)
Deadline for Applications: Sept 1st, 2021
Location: The position will be based in Grenoble, France, or Champs-sur-Marne, France with travel expected between these two cities. A proportion of remote working will also be possible.
Keywords: Text and data mining, scientometrics, data acquisition

Context

The NanoBubbles ERC Synergy project’s objective is to understand how, when and why science fails to correct itself. The project’s focus is claims made within the field of nanobiology. Project members combine approaches from the natural sciences, computer science, and the social sciences and humanities (Science and Technology Studies) to understand how error correction in science works and what obstacles it faces. For this purpose, we aim to trace claims and corrections in various channels of scientific communication (journals, social media, advertisements, conference programs, etc.) via natural language processing.

The challenge is to build datasets, models and tools that enable organising and analysing the rapidly evolving ecology of online comments complementary to conventional scientific records:

• This means not only counting citations received by a document but also assessing and leveraging the content of both cited and citing documents.
• This means not only identifying named entities, claims and counterclaims but also extracting structured knowledge from text.
• This means not only taking advantage of existing data to learn models but also building tools for creation and annotation of new sets of data so as to train advanced language models.

The hired person will interact with PhD students, interns and researchers hired as part of the ERC project.
He/she will also benefit from the skills and the research environment of 2 research units: the LISIS and the LIG.

Main tasks

• Building corpuses with data collected from heterogeneous sources (eg.: bibliographic databases like Scopus or Dimensions, full-text databases like ISTEX or open archive repositories, social networks, post-publication peer-review platforms and other online tools allowing annotations and comments…)
• Managing datasets, and creating formal links between them.
• Contributing to the development of a common vocabulary and mapping it to existing ontologies
• Implementing and managing various software pipelines to support data analysis and text mining.
• Helping the other team members to run experiments and validate their choices
• Documenting the data lifecycle and updating the data management plan

Profile

Engineer or Master’s degree in science, engineering, the humanities or social sciences relevant to research in digital humanities. Applicants with dual backgrounds in the sciences and humanities are particularly encouraged to apply.

Technical expertise in (one or more of) the following domains: descriptive statistics, data science, programming (for instance Python), natural language processing, network analysis, computational linguistics.

Skills include how to use a database (data manipulation, extraction of relevant data, merging of databases), how to locate, list, analyze and critique data (how to rule on the relevance of data or sources). Applicants know data documentation standards, best practices from software development (e.g., agile method), how to formalize techniques and methods and develop specifications.

Fluent English. Will participate in research group meetings and (co)author research articles in English.

Capacity and interest in working in a collaborative, interdisciplinary and international environment, with team members located in different countries.

We are looking for someone with expertise in some of the following technical skills (please provide a portfolio to demonstrate your expertise):

• Algorithmics, programming, database design, ontology building
• Programming from scratch and testing/reusing open source software
• Software code management (e.g., GIT, SVN)
• Shell scripting, programming (preferably: Python, SQL, Java, R, XML)
• Web scraping (e.g., HtmlUnit, Selenium)

Instructions for applying

Applications are expected until Sept 1st, 2021. They must contain: CV + letter/message of motivation + master notes + letter(s) of recommendation; and be addressed to Frederique Bordignon (frederique.bordignon@enpc.fr), Cyril Labbé (cyril.labbe@imag.fr), and Cyrus Mody (c.mody@maastrichtuniversity.nl).