Research Associate

Full Time- 35 hours per week

Fixed Term Contract- 24 months

The Opportunity:

The School of Informatics wishes to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the area of data visualization and HCI to work on the ‘Grasping Data’ project which is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Universities of Edinburgh (the Schools of Education and Informatics) and Glasgow (School of Computing Sciences). The vision of this project is to empower young children to create, explore, understand, and directly benefit from their personal data through visual and physical data representations and bespoke activities. As part of an interdisciplinary team the post holder will be responsible for investigating and co-designing data physicalizations and related activities with children.

Grasping Data is a large two-year funded project to change how we think about children and their personal data. The project goes beyond current emphases on privacy and protection by co-creating cutting-edge, child-centred tools and pedagogies with young children, helping them understand and directly benefit from their own data. We will achieve this by advancing diverse research fields of early learning, cognitive psychology, child-centred design, data ethics, data visualization, and computer science to explore the potential of Data Physicalization for children in their early years (aged 3-8) to construct (with adults) physical representations of their personal data that they can touch, explore, talk about and learn with. Our focus on the youngest learners pushes the boundaries of helping all ages to understand and benefit from data in an increasingly digital world.

The postholder will be based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI).The post is associated with the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research in Digital Education and within this, the Children, Interaction, and Design Group (CID), the Institute for Design Informatics (IDI) and within this, VisHub, an interdisciplinary research group for data visualization and HCI. For more information, please see the full job description (opens a new tab).

This post is full time at 1.0 FTE. We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working, so long as the core qualitative in-person research can be accommodated.   

Your skills and attributes for success: 

• A PhD or equivalent professional qualification (or near completion) in Data Visualisation, Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design or related relevant areas.
• Experience in designing data visualizations and/or physicalizations. 
• Experience in qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis, including conducting studies “in the wild”, i.e., in real-world environments.
• Experience and/or strong interest in working at the intersection of data visualization and child education, including the ethical challenges and safeguarding requirements of working with children
• Experience and/or interest in working interdisciplinarily across the sciences, humanities, art and design. 
• Knowledge and experience of academic publishing including e.g. first authorship and evidence of strong/independent writing capabilities in relevant venues such as IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, ACM DIS.

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