About the project
This position is part of a project focused on the spread of misinformation online. The project
is led by
Achim Edelmann and funded by
Project Liberty Institute. It intends to study the role
of scientific and political actors in the propagation of misinformation on public and private
online social networks in the U.S. and France as well as the impact of fact-checking on the
public discourse surrounding misinformation. The person hired will employ NLP, social
network analysis, and regression techniques to analyze media data associated with
misinformation on public platforms, including data from Twitter/X, that has been collected and
stored in an SQL database. To a smaller extent, s/he will also help in the preparation of
randomized controlled experiments to test how forms of scientific and political endorsements
curb or foster the sharing of misinformation.
Objectives of the position
The primary objective of this position is to analyze text data collected from digital platforms
as well as their diffusion thereon. The secondary objective is to use the results of the text
analysis to help in the preparation of related online experiments. The person hired will take
part in the following activities:
- Run NLP/ML analyses, entity and event detection algorithms, and network analyses on fact-checked articles, including their propagation and related reactions on social networks to measure, visualize, and (statistically) evaluate circulation, endorsements, and impacts of misinformation online;
- help in the preparation of randomized controlled web/online experiments to test how endorsements from social institutions curb or foster the sharing of misinformation across public and private messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.);
- contribute to the preparation and submission of academic articles on misinformation spread using all of the above.
Desired skills and experience
- Experience with Python and/or R (essential)
- Experience using NLP and ML libraries/packages to identify and categorize argumentative structures, contents, and their authors (essential)
- Experience working with SQL/PostgreSQL databases (essential)
- Experience working with heavy datasets on remote servers (recommended)
- Experience working with data collected from the web (web archives, HTML parsing, etc.) (recommended)
- Experience with statistical modeling (recommended)
- Experience with social network data and analysis and/or graph theory (helpful)
- Experience in web data collection (collection tools, scraping, APIs) (helpful)
- Experience in publishing peer-reviewed articles (recommended)
- Fluency in English (essential)
- Fluency in French (helpful)
The position
You will join the médialab at Sciences Po (Paris 7) and work with researchers, software
engineers, and data scientists. This is a good opportunity to learn and apply a wide range of
data science tools in the domains of natural language processing, machine learning, and
network analysis with applications to sociopolitical analysis. Depending on your career goals,
you will lead or participate as co-author in the production of academic articles.
This position is for
12 months initially. Envisioned start date is June 2024; a later start is
possible.
Competitive salary depending on experience, complemented with full health insurance, 40
days paid leave per year (+5 RTT) and restaurant-tickets. Possibility and extent of remote
work can be negotiated in line with Sciences Po’s agreement.
To apply
Send a CV and cover letter detailing your motivation and relevant skills for the position as
well as links to code and/or scientific publications to this email address while including
“[SPSM]” in the subject:
recrutement.medialab@sciencespo.fr. Review of applications will
start on
April 25th 2024 and continue until the position is filled. Please indicate in your
application when you would be able to start. Please also provide contact details for two
references; we will request those in the form of an informal Email and only for short-listed
candidates.
For inquiries about the position, please contact:
achim.edelmann@sciencespo.fr;
benjamin.ooghe@sciencespo.fr