Project description
The ERC consolidator project South American Population History Revisited (SAPPHIRE) seeks to reconstruct, on the basis of biogeographical, anthropological, population-genetic, and linguistic data, the population history of the Upper Amazon area in western South America, in order to establish how ecology, human behavior, and inter-ethnic communication strategies have impacted the development of the extraordinary patterns of linguistic diversity in the area. The project thus offers a unique opportunity to work in a truly multi-disciplinary context with internationally renowned domain experts, which offers the possibility to expand your horizon to other disciplines, cooperate with experienced specialists of these disciplines, and contribute to creating new knowledge about the history of South America.
In the context of this project, the Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics group at the Leiden University Center for Linguistics invites applicants for a 1.5-year full-time (extendable in time with a lower percentage) post-doctoral position in data science, which focuses on the inference of past population movements in the Upper Amazon area in western South America, on the basis of a multi-disciplinary approach. The candidate can start working directly with considerable amounts of standardized data (though in small samples). Databases typically consist of 70-200 linguistic and/or cultural features (for 30-150 individual languages) and have spatial coordinates associated with each language.
The main tasks of the successful candidate would be to develop and implement statistical methods to infer historical human interactions based on data from a variety of disciplines, and to expand the functionality of the glottospace R package.
Key responsibilities
- develop and implement statistical models and pattern detection methods, based on data from various disciplines
- solve statistical problems
- further develop the glottospace R package
- implement reproducible analytical pipelines
- active role in write-ups of the results
- actively and constructively take part in group meetings