Deadline: September 30, 2020
The position
A PhD position is available at the Department of Language and Culture (ISK) which belongs to the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education (HSL). The position is part of the THREAT-DEFUSER project which explores the role of “soft” information strategies propagated through mass and social media that can be used in hybrid warfare. We investigate Norwegian perceptions of Russia, as well as Russian perceptions of Norway, in the context of Norwegian national security.
The successful candidate will:
- Assemble a so-called “seed” vocabulary of dominant words and collocations that are symptomatic of news articles/broadcasts that highlight threats in Russian
- Learn to use functions such as semantic vectors and word embeddings in resources such as the Russian corpus in the Aranea Family of Gigaword Web Corpora and Collocations Colligations Corpora for Russian, with the aim of enhancing the seed vocabulary
- Further enhance seed vocabulary by extracting texts for analysis and comparison with reference corpora
- Identify texts with prominent threat-related content that can be tracked for connectivity in social media
- Identify texts with alternative messages for comparison
- Assist others in assembling and enhancing similar seed vocabularies and identifying texts for English, Norwegian, and North Saami
- Write up results in dissertation/articles for scholarly journals
- Assist in production of a webpage and podcast series to disseminate results
- Assist in organizing conferences and outreach activities
Work place is Campus Tromsø.
The position is for a period of three years.