Fully Funded PhD Studentship: Big Scripture: Tracking Translations, Citations and Paraphrases in Multilingual e-Corpus Text Data

The College of Arts and Humanities and the College of Science, Swansea University, invite applications for a fully funded PhD in Digital Humanities.

Project: The project’s objective is to create new ways of discovering, tracking and understanding past and present uses of scriptural texts (Bible, Quran) in massive text corpora, leveraging multiple translations in diverse languages in diverse sources. The sub-objectives are: (a) to track the translational (in)stability of concepts, passages, events, and named entities; (b) to track citations/paraphrases across linked e-corpora (archives of books and newspapers, new web corpora); (c) to develop techniques using dynamic, interactive visualisations to support exploratory analyses of this kind of big, fuzzy natural language data; (d) to encourage public engagement with this research.
The project is significant for comparative religious studies, politics, sociology, cultural histories, area studies, linguistics and translation studies, web studies, digital humanities and big text data analytics. It aims to transform academic and public understandings of cross-language religious tradition and change.

Eligibility: Candidates should have a good Bachelors (2.1 or higher) or Masters degree in Computer Science or a closely related discipline such as Digital Humanities, or computer-based Textual Studies. Applicants with proven humanities research software skills and some relevant domain knowledge (scripture, languages/translation) are highly desirable.

Candidates should be highly motivated, ambitious, focused, like to collaborate in a team and have:

1. Solid programming abilities with a strong interest in improving their software development skills
2. An interest in carrying out internationally leading, scholarly research including dissemination through conferences and journals
3. Experience in computer graphics, e.g., OpenGL and an interest in improving their computer graphics programming skills
4. Fluent and articulate communication in both written and spoken English – particularly with experience in academic writing.

Due to funding restrictions, this studentship is open to UK/EU candidates only. The deadline for applications is 30 April 2016.

For further information about this studenship and how to apply, please visit the following address : http://www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate/scholarships/research/digital-humanities-phd-tracking-translations-citations-paraphrases.php