Research Fellow / Associate - PRISM (NLP)

Location: Manchester, United Kingdom

Company

hirify.global is an academic institution supporting research, teaching and interdisciplinary collaboration.

What you will do

• Support the development of an interdisciplinary framework for identifying the rhetorical brands of online political influencers.
• Collect, clean, document and securely manage social media datasets and metadata from US and UK elections.
• Design, implement and evaluate NLP and machine-learning methods for classifying communicative frames, linguistic features and influencer styles.
• Contribute to annotation, validation and survey experiment analysis.
• Develop reproducible code and support academic publications and stakeholder-facing materials.

Requirements

• PhD or near-completion in Political Science, Media and Communication, Sociology or a related social science field.
• Strong programming and computational methods expertise using Python, R or similar languages.
• Experience with machine learning, NLP, text mining and reproducible coding practices.
• Experience analysing social media data using qualitative and quantitative methods.
• Excellent academic writing, collaboration, organisation and communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with transformer-based NLP models.
• Web or social media engagement experience.
• Experience with policy briefing, research server environments or data visualisation.
• Knowledge of social statistics or related academic subjects.

Culture & Benefits

• Interdisciplinary work in political communication and natural language processing.
• Collaborative environment focused on education, learning, community and open debate.
• Generous employer pension contribution.
• 29 days of annual leave plus bank holidays and Christmas closure.
• Ride-to-work and electric vehicle car schemes.
• Flexible and hybrid working arrangements are available according to university policy.