We offer a fully funded collaborative doctorate at the University of
Sheffield and The National Archives for UK/EU residents.

We are seeking a PhD student to help shape the future of information
exploration and discovery in big digital archives. There is a clear
need for cultural heritage institutions (museums, libraries and
archives) to provide systems that go beyond keyword-based search and
support more diverse information seeking behaviours, such as browsing
and exploration of large collections. Entities, such as people,
places, organisations and events, can be extracted from the archive
and linked to form a network that users can explore in addition to
navigating the content directly. The National Archives seeks to
collect and secure the future of the public record in all its forms
and to make it as accessible as possible. This project builds on
existing work to create linked data annotations and ontologies to
support the exploration of content within the UK Government Web
Archive (UKGWA).

Relevant research areas:
- Information Retrieval
- Natural Language Processing
- Linked Open Data
- Digital Libraries
- Entity-centric information access
- Time-aware information access

Required skills:
Familiarity with quantitative and qualitative research methods,
ability to work independently, excellent written and oral
communications skills, knowledge of formal research process, including
writing and presenting results/findings. Applicants will also have
strong analytical skills, programming skills, and a genuine interest
in designing, building and publishing innovative approaches and
systems to explore large-scale archive data.

Application deadline: 18th May 2015
Position start date: 1st October 2015

Find more information on the position and how to apply visit:
http://bit.ly/entity-centric-exploration-PhD

Informal enquiries about this position can be made to Dr Gianluca
Demartini (g.demartini@sheffield.ac.uk) and/or Prof. Paul Clough
(p.d.clough@sheffield.ac.uk)