Postdoctoral researcher, “NanoBubbles” at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, History Department at Maastricht University

Research project
The NanoBubbles ERC Synergy project’s objective is to understand how, when and why science fails to correct itself. The project’s focus is claims made within the field of nanobiology. Project members combine approaches from the natural sciences, computer science, and the social sciences and humanities (Science and Technology Studies) to understand how error correction in science works and what obstacles it faces. For this purpose, we aim to trace claims and corrections through various channels of scientific communication (journals, social media, advertisements, conference programs, etc.) via both qualitative and digital methods. More information can be found here: https://nanobubbles.hypotheses.org/

Your part of the project will be to apply digital humanities approaches to the study of how claims and counter-claims do (or don’t) move through different contexts of scientific work (laboratories, conferences, funding agencies, start-up companies, etc.). You will also be responsible for integrating digital humanities approaches with the qualitative methods (ethnography, archival research) and sources that the other Maastricht project members will employ; and you will work with members of the project at other universities who experts in computer science and library science to refine their, and your, digital humanities/social science techniques.

Job description
This is an exciting opportunity to join a highly interdisciplinary research team working at the forefront of Science and Technology Studies, Digital Humanities, ethics of/in research, and nanoscience.

You will:

• Help identify key communication channels within science (both past and present) where digital methods can be applied in tracing claims and counter-claims.
• Apply digital tools and methods (scripting and coding such as NLP) for elaborating historical and ethnographic understanding of debates arising from data in scientific conferences, archives, interviews, and social media (e.g., tweets related to recent conferences; conference monitors’ reports from older conferences; post-publication peer review comments).
• Coordinate OCRization of sources gathered by Maastricht University members of the project (you will set up an infrastructure and provide training so that other Maastricht project members and student assistants can carry out OCRization); work with personnel at other NanoBubbles sites to maintain best practices for OCRization across the entire project.
• Develop scripts using Python or R to interrogate the data, linking the diverse data sources to data gathered (throughout the NanoBubbles project) on the movement of claims and counter-claims through journal articles, social media, grant proposals, patents and other sources.
• Work closely with the NanoBubbles PhD candidate and co-PI at Maastricht University to meld historical, ethnographic, and digital approaches to the study of scientific conferences.
• Work closely with NanoBubbles team members outside Maastricht (affiliated primarily with sociology, computer science, and library science) to broaden the acceptance and applicability of data-driven claim-tracing tools and methods to a variety of new sources. These colleagues will provide some training; further training opportunities will be available both at Maastricht University and elsewhere.
• Write and co-author academic publications together with other members of the team.
• Plan and participate in team meetings as well as other project-based events and activities.