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Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2021, University of Oslo, Norway

Publish Date: Jun 28, 2020

Deadline: Sep 01, 2020

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

Job description

A Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (SKO 1352) for 2,5 years is available at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellowship is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and is associated with the Fakespeak project. The successful candidate is expected to present a research project closely connected to the main project. The project description should be finalized in collaboration with the project leaders within three months of the start date.

Expected startdate: 1 January 2021.

More about the position

Fake news, defined as news items that are meant to be deceptive and which the author knows to be false, is not a new phenomenon. However, the rapid development of social media now allows news from sources of varying reputation to be spread unfiltered at lightning speed and to be read by millions of people in a very short time. Western liberal democracies are vulnerable, and fake news and other types of disinformation may seriously harm them.

The main objectives of the Fakespeak project, which consists of a core team of linguists and computer scientists, are i) to identify the language and style of fake news in English, Norwegian and Russian, and  ii) to improve existing fake news detection systems by automating the defining linguistic features of fake news. Participants in this project are Faktisk.no, Norway’s first and, so far, only fact-checking service; the NRK, Norway’s largest media organization and broadcaster of news from all over the world; and the NTB, the Norwegian News Agency. The goal of the project is to help them and other stakeholders detect potentially harmful fake news items more efficiently and accurately and in a more timely manner than what is currently possible.

The postdoctoral research fellow to be hired at the Department will contribute to the project’s achieving objective i). S/he will harvest datasets mainly in English from the Internet, and analyse them statistically and visualize the results applying corpus linguistics methods. 

The position is available for a period of two and a half years (30 months). The successful candidate will have the possibility to apply to the Research Council of Norway for an extension of up to 6 months. There is a 10 % component of the position that is devoted to compulsory work (teaching, administrative duties, etc.) that will be assigned by the department in agreement with the project manager, depending on the candidate’s qualifications.

The successful candidate is expected to become part of the research environment/network of the department and contribute to its development. The main purpose of postdoctoral research fellowships is to qualify researchers for work in higher academic positions within their disciplines.

Qualification requirements

  • PhD or equivalent academic qualifications with a specialization in one or more of the areas relevant to the project (English language and linguistics, linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics)
  • Fluency in oral and written English
  • Solid knowledge of corpus linguistics methods, including experience in conducting corpus analyses of potentially fairly large amounts of data and performing statistical analyses and visualization
  • Personal suitability and motivation for the position
  • Experience in automatic data harvesting online is an advantage
  • Programming skills in Python or R, or both, are an advantage
  • Familiarity with Russian language is an advantage
  • The candidate's research project must be closely connected to the Fakespeak project

The ideal candidate is a quantitative corpus linguist specializing in English language and linguistics, but researchers from across linguistics, as well as computational linguistics, will also be considered.

The doctoral dissertation must have been submitted for evaluation before the application deadline.

For more information click "LINK TO ORIGINAL" below.


This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:

https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/188582/postdoctoral-research-fellowship-within-fakespeak

Similar Opportunities


Disciplines

European Studies

Languages

Linguistics

Literature

Study Levels

Postdoctoral

Opportunity Types

Fellowships

Eligible Countries

International

Host Countries

Norway