PSL University (Paris) is inviting applications for a five years Junior research fellow in computational social science inside the CultureLab project.
The applicant’s research should focus on the development and application of computational methods to analyse social and contemporary data. The successful candidate will have a background in sociology, computational social sciences, or a related field, and will develop a research program to answer questions of wide relevance to our contemporary cultures and societies, in relation with several (or all) of the program axes (see below). They will also be involved in the development of new algorithms and techniques for processing and analysing large-scale datasets of social and contemporary data, such as texts and images from websites, social media platforms etc. Beyond natively digital sources, the candidate will be expected to integrate non-natively digital sources (i.e. digitised sources) to its analysis, to put contemporary
data into a longer-term perspective (e.g., from the industrial revolution to our days). The successful candidate will also be expected to collaborate with other researchers on the project to integrate these computational methods with decision support tools and research-society interfaces, and to use these methods to inform decision-making and promote social impact.
This position is part of a PSL-funded project, “CultureLab”, which aims to fund computational research in the humanities and social sciences across all relevant PSL labs. The postdoctoral will have privileged access to CultureLab resources (research engineers, computational resources, PhD or master student grants, etc.).
The main project axis are:
Axis 1: Harvesting and annotating large scale cultural datasets, from texts to images
Axis 2: A theory-driven approach to computational humanities and social sciences
Axis 3: Inferring historical & social processes from data across timescales
Axis 4: Social impact through computational analysis of culture and heritage dataThe position’s duration is five years. The salary is competitive and comes with a package of
40,000 euros for research funding. The candidates must be early career researchers, either about to obtain their PhD or having obtained it between 2020 and now. Starting date will be in Autumn 2025.
The successful candidate will be based at the École Normale Supérieure, in its buildings on 45 rue d’Ulm (Paris, 5th arrondissement). The École Normale Supérieure is one component of PSL University, consistently ranked among the top 50 universities worldwide, is an interdisciplinary research university built on a collegial model. Other PSL partner institutions include the École des Chartes, CultureLab’s chief partner institution.
The junior research fellow will develop their own research program in partnership with the CultureLab environment; they will take part in shaping CultureLab’s governance through its executive committee, and will have opportunities to organise seminars and workshops funded by CultureLab. The junior research fellow will be asked to teach thirty hours per year for one of PSL’s undergraduate program.
Contact:
Jean-Baptiste Camps Jean-Baptiste.Camps@chartes.psl.eu
Olivier Morin olivier.morin@ens.psl.eu
Please send:
A resume with a list of publications (maximum two A4 pages);
A research statement and description of the project (maximum two A4 pages);
Contact information for two senior scientists who agree to recommend you.
The deadline for applications is March 20, 2025.
(This call, first advertised in November 2024, is re-issued for a March 2025 deadline.)
