Univeristy of Twente Post-DOC Navigating stories in times of transition

This project wants to advance multidisciplinary approaches to digital storytelling. When major transitions happen, people respond by telling stories that create continuity and change. In a digital age, storytelling has become even more abundant, rich in variety, and accelerating in pace. The current Covid-19 pandemic allows to study digital stories while transitions are happening, rather than in hindsight. In a multidisciplinary team of researchers, we will access existing and growing databases to analyze how different types of stories evolve over time. With regard to eScience methodologies, the goal is to develop a Story Navigator, a dashboard that visualizes the multilayered, multidimensional, and changing contextual network of stories, building in particular on Digital Story Grammar methodology that allows to study narrative elements in their mutual relations. The Story Navigator allows for an optimal interaction between human and computer analysis to further advance the field. The project provides proof of concept and then integrates the Story Navigator into the Media Suite of the Dutch infrastructure for digital humanities and social sciences (CLARIAH) to facilitate dissemination and long-term use. The tool will find broad use in interdisciplinary narrative studies, in domains like health, cultures of organizations, oral histories, and public debates.

You will be responsible for coordinating and carrying out the project together with escience engineers from the Netherlands eScience Center and under supervision of an interdisciplinary group of researchers. The project is carried out in close collaboration with the Department of Media Studies and the Institute of Language, Logic, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands eScience Center, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Institute for Sound and Vision as well as the Danish National Center for Social Research.

We offer an exciting position in a stimulating, international environment. We have a strong culture of interdisciplinary research within the Institutional Behaviour department. Throughout the faculty and university, we work together with scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences. Various initiatives and infastructures at Twente will enable exciting opportunities, in specific the Story Lab.