[Air-L] Post-doctoral opportunity in computational social science with Project Hatemeter: Prevent and combat racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance

[Becky Lentz]

Post-doctoral Opportunity

Project Hatemeter: Prevent and combat racism, xenophobia and other forms of
intolerance

            The Maison des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Soci?t? (MSHS-T) is
recruiting a temporary junior researcher in computational social science (at
the post-doctoral level) for a period of 12 months to help produce,
implement and evaluate an online tool to track hate speech, as part of the
interdisciplinary Hatemeter project.

The position will be part of a European-wide project to develop a hate
speech tool for monitoring, analyzing and tackling Anti-Muslim hatred
online. Funded by the European Commission, this research aims to systematize
and share knowledge of Anti-Muslim hatred online. Its goal is also to
increase the efficiency and effectiveness of Non-Governmental Organizations
(NGOs) and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in preventing and tackling
Islamophobia. It also aims to develop and test the Hatemeter Platform that
will automatically monitor and analyze Internet and social media data on the
phenomenon, as well as produce computer-assisted responses and prompts to
support counter-narratives and awareness raising campaigns.

Tasks will include both qualitative and quantitative work. The qualitative
work will involve assisting other French researchers in collecting
preliminary data on Islamophobia online and conducting in-depth interviews
of users, including relevant NGOs and CSOs in France. This stage will also
include analyzing this qualitative data.
The quantitative work will be the bulk of the position and will include
working with other European researchers on developing the Hatemeter
platform, using data analytics and visualization. This will include social
media data crawling, text processing, such as opinion mining, as well as
sentiment and emotion analysis. This will also include the creation of a
database for both structured and unstructured data integration. Work will
also include implementation of a data visualization dashboard. This will
provide functionalities for the visual exploration and analysis of the data,
enabling content monitoring, synchronic and diachronic comparisons, close
and distant reading, data clustering, network analysis, etc. Pictorial and
graphical format will be used as much as possible so to make the tool
language and country-independent. This will also include implementation and
evaluation of this Hatemeter tool.

The post-doc will work in close collaboration with a group of
interdisciplinary researchers across Europe, as well as in collaboration
with researchers at MSHS-T.

Interested candidates are invited to send the following documents to
Jerome.ferret at ut-capitole.fr<mailto:Jerome.ferret at ut-capitole.fr> ET
jen.schradie at iast.fr<mailto:jen.schradie at iast.fr>

before 2018 January 10 with the subject line: Hatemeter Position and
containing the following:

CV
Cover Letter

Three articles or book chapters

List and contact information of three people to contact for references

Profile:

The candidate must hold a doctorate in a social science discipline.

Demonstrated experience in computational content analytics, such as NLP,
machine learning, visualization, network analysis.

A very good command of English and French.

Ability to work well with an international research team.

Duration: 12 months, non-renewable, starting date February 2018.

Salary:

2.300 ? brut (environ 1.850 ? net)