Postdoc in Digital Humanities / Philosophy of Science

The University of Sydney; Sydney; On-site; AUD 118,000 - 126,000; Full time

Job summary

The University of Sydney invites applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Digital Humanities / Philosophy of Science in Camperdown. You will develop bibliometric methods and text classification models to explore concepts across academic, media and social texts.

Join a large, interdisciplinary team and contribute to ARC Discovery Projects on bioessentialism and related themes. Strong background in NLP/ML and experience with large text corpora is essential.

Qualifications

• PhD in digital humanities and related fields.
• Experience with large text corpora (curation, cleaning, structuring).
• Experience using NLP/ML to build and evaluate text classification models.
• Experience in prompt engineering techniques.
• Interest in interdisciplinary collaboration and translating research questions into computational tasks.
• Strong written communication and peer-reviewed publications.

Responsibilities

• Curate, clean and structure large text corpora from news media, social media and academic literature.
• Develop and refine automated classification pipelines using machine learning and LLM approaches.
• Design prompting strategies to optimise classifier precision and recall.
• Contribute to interpretation of outputs in light of philosophical and psychological theories.
• Co-author peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations.
• Contribute to open science practices with code, data and documentation for public repositories (e.g. OSF).

Skills

NLP

Machine learning

Prompt engineering

Text classification

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Education

PhD in Digital Humanities

Job description

Contract

- Full time, 2 years fixed term, with the potential for extension to a 3rd year

- Lead innovative research using AI-powered text analysis to reveal how concepts are used academically, in the media and across social

- Base Salary, Academic level A $117,936 - $125,896 + 17% superannuation

About the opportunity

The School of History and Philosophy of Science is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate - Digital Humanities / Philosophy of Science to develop and deploy bibliometric methods and text classification models to identify concepts and conceptual patterns in large bodies of text.

This research forms a part of two ARC Discovery Project(s) ‘Genes germs and gender: the rise and impact of bioessentialism’ and ‘Symbiotic Synergies: How the Body Became a Chimera (1950-2000)’. The successful candidate will join a large, interdisciplinary research group of philosophers, historians, psychologists, and scientists, contributing empirical evidence to support the group's philosophical investigations.

Your key responsibilities will be to:

• Curate, clean and structure large text corpora from news media, social media and academic literature
• Develop and refine automated classification pipelines using machine learning and LLM approaches
• Design prompting strategies to optimise classifier precision and recall
• Contribute to the interpretation of classification outputs in light of philosophical and psychological theories and concepts
• Co-author peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations
• Contribute to open science practices, including preparing code, data and documentation for public repositories (e.g. OSF).

About You

• A PhD in a relevant field in the digital humanities
• Experience curating, cleaning and structuring large corpora
• Experience using NLP and/or ML to build and evaluate text classification models
• Experience in prompt engineering techniques
• An interest in interdisciplinary collaboration
• The ability to translate conceptual research questions into computational tasks
• Strong written communication skills and a track record of peer-reviewed publication
• The ability to work independently and as part of a collaborative, interdisciplinary team.

Location: Camperdown

AU$117,936 to AU$125,896. Base, Academic Level A + 17% superannuation