Senior Research Associate in Smart Data

The role

This ‘Research Fellow in Smart Data’ position will entail work on an exciting new ESRC-funded Smart Data Research UK research project: ‘An Atlas of Economic Activities in the UK: Tapping into Web Archives for Social Science Research’. The successful candidate will work directly with Prof Emmanouil Tranos, Dr Levi Wolf and Dr Rui Zhu and join the vibrant Research Group of Quantitative Spatial Science at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.

What will you be doing?

The successful post-holder will have a strong background and/or interest in effectively utilising large textual data to answer geographical questions. We are particularly interested in researchers with expertise in two methodological domains: (i) state-of-the-art text analysis methods including Natural Language Processing, geographic information retrieval, and Large Language Models, and (ii) spatial analysis or geographic data science.

The successful candidate together with the rest of the research team will use web data to map economic activities in the UK at an unprecedented level of detail. Specifically, the project will use textual data from large web archives that the research team is very experienced in working with to infer new and flexible typologies of economic activities in the UK. We will map the clustering of such activities in the UK and model their evolution across space and time.

The post-holder will be responsible for leading and contributing towards publishing academic journal articles as well as presenting the work at international conferences. We will create data products and new computational tools for the broader community to effectively access and analyse textual data from web archives. The project will also offer amble opportunities for the successful candidate to disseminate our results to various and diverse communities and contribute to impact activities (e.g., workshops with stakeholders).

You should apply if

You have research experience in developing and/or utilising (i) textual analysis, information retrieval, NLP and/or LLM, and (ii) spatial analysis or geographic data science to answer geographical research questions.

Additional information

Contract type: Open ended with fixed funding for 12 months

This advert will close at 23:59 UK time on 17/07/2024

Interviews are anticipated to take place on 26/07/24

For informal queries, contact details: Emmanouil Tranos, e.tranos@bristol.ac.uk

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