In the research program ‘Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing global information networks in historical newspaper repositories, 1840-1914 (1.0 FTE, 17 months)
‘You will be part of a two-year international research project that is funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the fourth Digging into Data challenge. “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914” (OcEx) brings together leading efforts in computational periodicals research from the nine academic partners in US, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK to examine patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth-century newspapers by linking digitised newspaper corpora currently siloed in national collections. OcEx seeks to break through the conceptual, institutional, and political barriers which have limited working with big humanities data by bringing together historical newspaper experts from different countries and disciplines around common questions. This is done by actively crossing the national boundaries that have previously separated digitised newspaper corpora through computational analysis and by illustrating the global connectedness of nineteenth-century newspapers in ways hidden by typical, national organisations of digital cultural heritage.
You will work under the supervision of the project leader Jaap Verheul in the work package ‘Conceptual Migration’, which aims to model and visualise the conceptual migration and translation of texts across regional, national, and linguistic boundaries. The full research team consists of cultural historians and digital humanities scholars from consortium partners Northeastern University (USA), Universität Stuttgart (Germany), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and University of Turku (Finland). You will be responsible for developing historical ‘use cases’ that demonstrate how the tools developed in the project can be used to trace, analyse, and visualise the migration and translation of ideas over regional and linguistic borders. This requires the ability to evaluate digital newspapers repositories and analytical software tools that are developed in the project. You will be based at the Cultural History section of the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University, which provides a stimulating and internationally oriented research environment.