Postdoc in Digital Humanities / Philosophy of Science

• 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.

How to apply

Applications (including a cover letter, CV, and any additional supporting documentation) can be submitted via the Apply button at the top of the page.

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Location: Camperdown

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