Post-doc: Measuring the Evolution of Industrial Modernity (1900-2018)

Post-doc: Measuring the Evolution of Industrial Modernity (1900-2018)

Starting date: Starting at 01.11.2019, temporary contract to 31.10.2021

Application deadline: 16.09.2019

Full Or Part Time: Full time

Location: Tartu, Estonia

Link: https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/423402

A research group in a University of Tartu, Estonia, is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join us in studying the evolution of industrial modernity. The project is based on the Deep Transitions framework (Schot & Kanger, 2018; Kanger & Schot, 2018 ) that aims to conceptualize the 250-year developmental trajectory of industrial societies through the co-evolution of socio-technical systems. The key questions our team seeks to answer are as follows: 1) What are the foundational features of industrial modernity, characterizing almost every industrial society to date, that have shaped its evolution? 2) Do we see some significant ruptures along these dimensions in recent decades?

The candidate will be a part of the team tasked with measuring long-term trends in the historical evolution of industrial societies along multiple dimensions (ideas, institutions, and practices) and on multiple scales (national, global). The project seeks to combine data from existing databases with analysis of digitized text corpora. Therefore, we are looking for a candidate with 1) competence in data analysis skills applicable to the analysis of large historical text collections; 2) methodological creativity in finding ways to utilize text corpora for tracking long-term societal trends.

The research group is highly interdisciplinary, involving (among others) experts from sustainability transitions studies, digital humanities, history and environmental sociology. As such applicants from diverse backgrounds are welcome to apply.

The position is funded by the Estonian Science Council and is part of the project “Reshaping Estonian energy, mobility and telecommunications systems on the verge of the Second Deep Transition”.

The researcher is expected to engage in the following tasks, some of which involve close collaboration with other team members:

• Operationalizing the features of industrial modernity in order to track them in historical data.
• Extracting text corpora from public sources, organizing and storing them.
• Cleaning and processing historical OCR texts and preparing them for analysis.
• Assisting in designing and formulating collaborative procedures and workflows to study the representations of industrial modernity in historical texts utilizing the interdisciplinary domain expertise in the group.
• Conducting data analysis and text mining on historical corpora through various techniques, interpreting and integrating the results.
• Representing the findings in thematic conferences and participating in the write-up of the results for journal submission.

See also the general job requirements for the University of Tartu (Research Fellow, pages 6 and Annex 8, page 20)

Required qualifications

• PhD degree or equivalent research qualification.

• See also requirements for teaching and research staff.

Required experience

Essential Experience in at least two of the following areas:

• Gathering and maintaining large digital corpora for text mining

• Applying NLP on historical OCR texts

• Keyword extraction, topic modeling, sentiment analysis

• Automatic content extraction and text classification

• Time series analysis of large text collections

• Cultural analytic studies based on large text collection

In addition:

*Readiness to learn new techniques as needed

• Excellent oral and written proficiency in English

• Independent, creative and critical thinking, capability to cope with uncertainty.

Desirable but not essential

• Prior experience in studying long-term trends with quantitative tools

• Disciplinary background in fields that have engaged in long-term and macro-l