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)