Job Vacancy: DH Research Coordinator at Ghent University

Ghent University is currently looking for a Digital Humanities Research Coordinator, starting at the earliest possible date. The successful candidate will coordinate the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities and DARIAH-BE (consisting of the Flemish consortium DARIAH-VL and DARIAH-Wallonie Bruxelles). The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities develops DH collaboration and supports research projects, teaching activities and infrastructure projects across the faculties and libraries. The GhentCDH is also coordinating the Belgian activities within the DARIAH-EU consortium network. The candidate will report to the GhentCDH steering committee and to the national coordinator (alternating chairmanship).

The successful candidate will be responsible for: 

• Coordinating the development of the Virtual Research Environment Service Infrastructure (VRE.SI), a Hydra/Fedora Commons based VRE within the framework of DARIAH-VL. This Service Infrastructure will provide researchers in the Humanities with user-friendly applications for processing (data ingest, quality assurance, asset management, annotation, analysis) and dissemination of digitized research data. DARIAH-VL VRE.SI will be set up by a consortium of work groups at Ghent University, Antwerp University and KU Leuven, in collaboration with the Flemish Institute for Archiving (VIAA) and federal scientific institutions (CEGESOMA, State Archives, ..). The coordinator will monitor and coordinate the development teams involved, the participating pilot research projects, report to DARIAH and will take care of project partners communication within DARIAH and with other projects and institutions;
• Establishing and enhancing a sustainable and coordinated network infrastructure and user community on top of partly existing and unlinked DH infrastructures, at Ghent University and at the DARIAH-VL level;
• Coordinating the communication between national and international partners of DARIAH-BE;
• Organizing and sustaining an interdisciplinary, sustainable and much-needed Belgian network of Digital Humanists that operates within a larger European network;
• Supporting the planning of and application writing for participation in (inter)national research projects;
• Functioning as a representative interlocutor to stakeholders with interests in the Digital Humanities;

GhentCDH and DARIAH-BE have as joint objective the aim to support, aggregate and accelerate research in the broad field of the digital humanities; to improve the digital literacy of researchers in the humanities, to install more efficient research methodologies and to unlock new research questions; to unlock the research potential of digitized analogue and born digital sources provided by cultural heritage institutions by making them interoperable and by creating virtual research environments;

Preferred qualifications: 

• Ph.D. in humanities or social sciences and a documented interest in fields such as: corpus linguistics, digital research in literature, historical network analysis, data visualization
• Experience with historical spatial and/or textual analysis is an asset
• Experience with the use or development of web-based DH scholarly working environments (e.g. VRE’s) would be an asset
• Participation in grant writing and applications for national and international research funds
• Project management experience
• Fluency in English, other languages are a plus
• The candidate is an enthusiastic and inventive team player and must be willing to travel abroad

What we offer:

• A full-time appointment will be renewed and extended after an initial six months contract.
• Contact with interdisciplinary national and international research groups
• The salary (100% postdoctoral researcher) depends on qualifications and experience. More information can be found here. Besides working in stimulating and innovative surroundings, Ghent University offers several other benefits such as: free public transport between home and work place; biking fee; access to university sports facilities and university restaurants. More information:https://www.ugent.be/en/work
• The post comes with a travel expenses budget

Applying

If you are interested in joining us, please send your CV and cover letter with a short motivation explaining your application, until October 24th, 2014 to: Prof. Dr. Christophe Verbruggen (christophe.verbruggen@ugent.be) and Prof. Dr. Gunther Martens (gunther.martens@ugent.be) . Please mention “DH Research coordinator” in the subject line.