CultureLab Excellence chair

CultureLab is a five-year interdisciplinary program led by Université PSL, aimed at structuring and coordinating computational research in the humanities and social sciences. Centered around two Junior Chairs of Excellence and overseen by an executive committee and a scientific advisory board, the project brings together several PSL institutions and external partners under a shared governance model. It is administratively hosted by the École nationale des chartes–PSL and the École normale supérieure–PSL.

CultureLab supports joint research initiatives, shared technical resources, and training activities. The Jean Nicod Institute at ENS–PSL is a key institution within CultureLab. The selected candidate will work in the institutional environment of the Jean Nicod Institute, in collaboration with the ENS–PSL Research Division for Literature, particularly with the Digital Humanities Observatory.

The position is based at the École normale supérieure, at its premises located at 45 rue d’Ulm (Paris 5th). As a component of Université PSL, regularly ranked among the top 50 universities worldwide, ENS is an interdisciplinary research institution built on a collegiate model. Among other PSL partner institutions is the École des chartes, the main partner of CultureLab.

MAIN MISSION

The candidate will conduct research on the development and application of computational methods to the analysis of social and contemporary data. They should have training in sociology, computational social sciences, or a related field, and will develop a research program addressing important questions for contemporary cultures and societies, in connection with several (or all) of the program’s thematic areas (see below).

They will also participate in designing new algorithms and techniques for processing and analyzing large datasets of social and contemporary materials—such as texts or images from websites, social media platforms, etc. In addition to born-digital sources, they should integrate digitized sources into their analyses to place contemporary data in a historical perspective (for example, from the Industrial Revolution to the present day).

The candidate will also collaborate with other researchers in the project to integrate these computational methods into decision-support tools and research–society interfaces, and to use these methods to inform decision-making and foster social impact.

The main thematic areas of the program are:

• Axis 1: Collection and annotation of large cultural corpora, from text to image
• Axis 2: A theoretical approach to computational humanities and social sciences
• Axis 3: Inferring historical and social processes from data across multiple time scales
• Axis 4: Social impact of computational analysis of culture and heritage

MAIN ACTIVITIES

The junior researcher will develop their own research program in partnership with the CultureLab environment; they will participate in the project’s governance via the executive committee and have the opportunity to organize seminars and workshops funded by CultureLab. The junior researcher will also be invited to teach 30 hours per year in one of PSL’s academic programs.