Are you looking for a challenging job in a dynamic team? The Humanities Labs of the Faculty of Humanities are looking for an enthusiastic and experienced Front-End Developer for Data Visualisation. The post holder will play a key role in developing the links between the research schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR) and the new Data Science Centre (DSC) at the University of Amsterdam. You will work within a highly successful research environment within the Humanities Labs that covers new (3D) media, digital innovation and advanced computational methods for humanities research. The Humanities Labs bring together scholars in world-leading departments within the Faculty with a long-standing tradition of using advanced digital methods and the ever-growing amount of cultural and social data, including scholars from Media Studies, History, Arts and Culture, and the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation.

Your workspace at the Humanities Labs of the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research will be the basis from which you collaborate with researchers in those departments, while one day a week you join the other DSC data scientists and engineers at the University Library. Outside UvA, we expect you to collaborate and exchange knowledge with the developers and researchers in CLARIAH, and with international initiatives in the area of cultural heritage, digital humanities and AI, such as the European Time Machine project or PURE3D.

We envision the work of the Front-End Developer for Data Visualisation to be applied and focussed on grand humanities data challenges. This requires advanced solutions, and the developer can learn from the approaches in other sciences based at DSC. At the same time, we also believe that the developer should be able to work closely together with researchers to facilitate the analysis and publication of research results for a diverse audience.

What are you going to do?
In the humanities, scholars often work with existing data hosted at cultural heritage institutions, such as galleries, archives, libraries, and museums (GLAM). These include digitized versions of analogue sources (e.g., scans of textual sources, digital photographs of analogue objects or pictures, and digitized audio, film or video files); data derived from analogue or digitized sources (e.g., transcriptions and annotations obtained via OCR/HTR/ASR/Computer Vision algorithms; 3D models of various sorts with annotation sets; structured data either manually or automatically extracted from textual or (audio)visual sources); or born-digital data scraped from websites or extracted from social media platforms via Web-APIs. Your task is to develop dedicated frontend solutions that allow researchers to work with this data (e.g. to gather research data through annotation, information extraction, or structured data entry), and to develop online 2D and 3D presentation environments where research results can be presented. Specific focus is given towards developing non-traditional interfaces that prioritise user interaction and exploring new ways of visualising AI research results. In these tasks you will be supported by the team of developers at the Humanities Labs and DSC and where relevant by professional training opportunities.

Your tasks and responsibilities:

• Designing and building fully-fledged research environments for a variety of humanities research projects, including online 2D and 3D viewer interfaces and facilities for data analysis and publication;
• Supporting researchers in the Faculty of Humanities in acquiring, cleaning, pre-processing, modelling, linking, analysing and publishing historical, linguistic and cultural data;
• Accessing and storing web and social media data through APIs and other techniques;
• Advising researchers on how to work with cultural heritage data and integrating those data in the research project along the latest standards;
• Advising on data models and data storage in line with standards developed in the field (FAIR principles);
• Collaborating with the other data engineers and data scientists at the DSC and beyond.