Scientific programmer: folktale search and visualisation
The FACT project will investigate new possibilities for humanities researchers (folktale researchers, narratologists, documentalists, etc.) to study folktales based on annotations and relations that have been automatically assigned using data-driven methods. The Dutch Folktale Database (Nederlandse Volksverhalenbank) of the Meertens Institute is a very large and varied collection of Dutch Folktales. Within FACT, software will be developed to automatically enrich the folktales in this collection with metadata such as names, keywords, genre, a summary and type. An additional research goal is to investigate if automatic analysis of the folktale collection can reveal relations between folktales that are difficult to discover through human inspection. The annotation and clustering methods to be developed will be integrated in a user-friendly XML-based platform for the annotation and exploration of folktales, to support research on the variability of human oral and written transmission.
The University of Twente has vacancies for a PhD-student, a postdoc and a scientific programmer, who will be working together as a team to achieve the project goals. In addition there will be close cooperation with the Tunes & Tales project (funded under the Computational Humanities programme of KNAW) that is aimed at investigating sequences of motifs in, and variability of, melodies and folktales in oral transmission.
The scientific programmer will work on the development of user-friendly tools for folktale researchers that incorporate the annotation and clustering techniques developed by the postdoc and the PhD student. The annotation tool should allow for (semi) automatic annotation of folktales with language, genre, keywords, names, summary and type. The visualization tool should enable easy inspection of document clusters. In addition, the programmer will develop an XML-based search system that allows the general public to search for folktales in the Folktale Database based on their annotations.
Apply on-line (Deadline: 1 November 2011)