Research Associate (Language) Centre For Digital Humanities, Institute for the Study of Muslim ...

Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations

Location

London, United Kingdom

Introduction

The Language Research Assistant (LRA) will play a key supporting role in the early stages of the ERC-funded KITAB-Transform project. The postholder will contribute to research and development activities, including bibliographic and metadata research, corpus management, and the preparation of scholarly outputs and case studies. The LRA will work closely with the research team to help build and maintain a robust digital research corpus.

Responsibilities

• Enhance metadata and support beta model evaluation, contributing to foundational research tasks across project work packages.
• Annotate book files using a text editor (training provided).
• Evaluate datasets in line with project guidance (training provided).
• Support corpus expansion through Optical Character Recognition (OCR), including quality checking (training provided).
• Conduct bibliographic research and collaborate with the Corpus Manager to curate relevant materials.
• Assist in drafting preliminary case study reports.
• Support preparation and transformation of the project's edited research volume.
• Undertake additional research tasks assigned by the Principal Investigator.

Requirements

• Master's degree or postgraduate training in Digital Humanities, Library Science, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience in bibliographic research and working with academic databases or digital corpora.
• Ability to manage and enhance metadata accurately and efficiently.
• Familiarity with corpus management tools or digital research platforms.
• Experience working with Arabic texts.
• Competence in handling structured data and digital text formats.
• Strong collaborative skills and ability to work effectively within a research team.
• Excellent attention to detail and ability to manage multiple tasks concurrently.

Desirable Criteria

• Familiarity with academic publishing processes or preparation of edited volumes.
• Basic understanding of GitHub.

Contract Details

• Contract Type: Fixed-term, part-time (0.5 FTE)
• Duration: Two years
• Salary: £16,500 per annum (0.5 FTE), based on a full-time equivalent of £33,000

Working Pattern

• The role follows a hybrid working model. The postholder will be expected to work partially on site at the London office on a regular basis, with specific arrangements to be agreed with the line manager.