The University of Amsterdam’s research priority area Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity (ACHI) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher in the area of Architectural History or Digital Archaeology (17th-century) as part of the NWO project Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research: Spatially Enhanced Publications of the Creative Industries of the Dutch Golden Age, jointly conducted by Huygens ING and the University of Amsterdam by principal applicant prof. Charles van den Heuvel and co-applicants prof. Julia Noordegraaf and prof. Gabri van Tussenbroek and in partnership with Brill and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

You will contribute to the Virtual Interiors project by conceptualizing and developing 3D/4D models of interiors of houses that serve as interactive visual interfaces to the vast amount of textual and visual descriptions of objects of the creative industries in the households of Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age, as well as a variety of (un)structured contextual data. These models, based on archival research (supported by the Junior Researcher of the project), will build upon the historical GIS of the creative industries of Amsterdam (developed by the PhD of the project) and serve as input for a Virtual Research Environment for analysis and annotation of historical data for research of the creative industries (developed by the Embedded Postdoctoral Researcher of the project). For the creation of such dynamic models, the candidate needs to be able to handle changes over time of heterogeneous information with multiple levels of uncertainty and complex methodological issues.

Tasks will include:

• researching, building and publishing the interiors of two houses of the Dutch Golden Age in 3D/4D;
• completion of two peer reviewed articles;
• regular presentation of intermediate research results at workshops and conferences, and publications in proceedings and journals;
• close collaboration with the other researchers of the group (including on issues not directly connected to one’s own project, such as supporting the management and coordination of the project and its dissemination activities).

Related vacancies of the Virtual Interiors project are 'Postdoctoral Researcher Information Science / Computer Science' and 'Junior Researcher Architectural History / Urban History'.

If you are the postdoctoral researcher we are looking for, you have:

• a doctoral degree in a relevant field (such as Architecture, History or Archaeology), obtained or with a defense data set by 1 September 2018;
• proven skills in and affinity with 3D modeling methods and software;
• a strong background or demonstrable interest in working with Dutch 17th-century archival textual and visual sources;
• good academic writing and presentation skills;
• good social and organizational skills;
• a track record of project-based work and the ability to function in a multidisciplinary team;
• proficiency in Dutch and English.

You will be appointed for 38 hours per week (1.0 FTE ) for a maximum period of three years at the Department of Media Studies of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. The research will be carried out under the aegis of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, one of the six research schools within the Faculty of Humanities and partner of the Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity. The appointment is initially for a period of 12 months; contingent on satisfactory performance it will be extended by a maximum of 24 months. The intended starting date of the contract is 1 September 2018. The gross monthly salary (on a full-time basis) will range from €3,238 to €3,722 depending on your experience and qualifications. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

http://www.uva.nl/en/home

Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity

Our mission is to explore the effects of cultural heritage in a broad sense (from material culture to art, literature, and the new media) on processes of identity formation and the effects of identities on the meanings attributed to cultural heritage.

Individuals and groups collect, preserve, and distribute the material and immaterial remains of the past in order to position themselves in time and space, to determine where they come from, to whom they belong, and where they are heading.

Heritage is our ‘cultural DNA’: material objects such as everyday objects, monuments, and architecture and immaterial forms of heritage such as values, ideas, and ritual practices are the essential building blocks of local, national, or transnational identities. Just as much as today’s genetics may work to the benefit of physical health, understanding the interactions between cultural heritage and identities contributes substantially to the quality of individual life and society.

The project Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research: Spatially Enhanced Publications of the Creative Industries of the Dutch Golden Age is jointly conducted by Huygens ING and the University of Amsterdam by principal applicant prof. Charles van den Heuvel and co-applicants prof. Julia Noordegraaf and prof. Gabri van Tussenbroek and in partnership with Brill and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The project is conducted within ACHI’s research program Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective led by Julia Noordegraaf. CREATE researchers use large-scale digital data and techniques to investigate how cultural industries have shaped Amsterdam’s unique position as a Creative City in a European and global context, from the 17th century until the present day. One of the core themes is the Amsterdam Time Machine, an information system with geographical data at its core, to which the Virtual Interiors project will contribute a ‘proof of concept’.

You will be supervised by Gabri van Tussenbroek and Charles van den Heuvel. You will also closely collaborate with the Faculty of Humanities’ 4D Research Lab, which facilitates researchers from different disciplines in the Humanities who have specific spatial and architectural questions that cannot be answered with traditional methods.

http://achi.uva.nl/