The Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) is looking for a 2-year post-doctoral researcher for the
Digital Communication Methods Lab. The Lab focuses on innovative research and bringing together existing and new projects with digital communication methods as its cornerstone.
This postdoctoral position focuses on research aimed at advancing computational methods for communication science (e.g., automated content analysis). Technological advancements enable communication scientists to collect different types of data (e.g., through scraping social media data, gathering data through digital agents, receiving data through data donations). Introduction of these novel data collection methods results in availability of large quantities of data that come in various formats (e.g., text data, visual data). This brings on methodological challenges of analyzing such data. In sum, communication researchers now have a broad range of novel computational methods at their disposal to gather and analyze large amounts of data that vary in their format. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the usage and validity of these methods. For example, whereas some algorithms are available to analyze visual data, these algorithms have not been validated on data relevant to communication scholars. This postdoctoral position will contribute to advancing the Lab's methodological and substantive research in this area by conducting research that advances and validates methods aimed at gathering and analyzing data that are relevant to communication scholars.
What are you going to doYou will conduct research on the advancement of computational research methods for communication science. This research should be predominantly methodological in nature, that is make use of, develop, and validate state-of-the-art digital communication methods to gather and analyze textual and visual data (for example digital trace data)- thus, making a strong substantive contribution for Communication Science. You will also contribute to lab's work in stimulating use of novel computational methods to gather and analyze communication data among faculty members.
You will:
- Develop, conduct, and publish research on the advancement of computational research methods;
- Identify the needs of faculty members in terms of required support when working with computational methods and initiate the development of required infrastructures;
- Be a go to-person for faculty members who have questions about computational and digital methods (for example by supporting faculty members and by hosting workshops);
- Contribute to the Digicomlab by organizing events, research meetings, and general activities;
- Collaborate with other faculty members within the lab;
- Contribute to new grant applications;
- Co-supervise research projects of students working on relevant topics;
- The above tasks are for 0.75fte. Pending on departmental need and the background and preference of the candidate, an additional 0.25fte will be allocated to teaching.