We are seeking a highly motivated and detail-oriented graduate student to support a research project in the School of Journalism, Media and Communication on the alignment of external propaganda narratives by Russian and Chinese state media. The project explores the convergence of messaging around Western sanctions and US-China relations through computational and qualitative methods. The successful candidate will contribute to the creation of a research corpus and assist in the data collection and computational analysis of online media content.
Job Description
The successful candidate will work under the supervision of the project leads and will be responsible for supporting both the empirical and computational dimensions of the research. Main responsibilities will include:
- Assisting in the collection and preparation of online content from media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Rumble, CGTN, RT)
- Organising and cleaning textual and visual data for analysis
- Supporting the application of computational methods (e.g., NLP, topic modelling, clustering) to analyse state-sponsored media narratives
- Documenting the data collection process and maintaining research logs
- Participating in bi-weekly team meetings and contributing to discussions on methodological development
Person Specification
We are looking for a candidate who meets the following criteria:
Essential:
- Currently enrolled in or recently completed a postgraduate degree (PhD) in media studies, international relations, data science, linguistics, political communication, or a related field
- Demonstrable experience with content analysis or computational social science
- Familiarity with Python or R for text/data analysis
- Strong organisational skills and attention to detail
- Ability to work independently and meet deadlines
Desirable:
- Knowledge of languages other than English (particularly, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Spanish or French)
- Interest in or prior knowledge of international narratives, state media, or information warfare
- Experience using Large Language Models (LLM) and/or Natural Language Processing (NLP) libraries (e.g., spaCy, NLTK, transformers)
- Experience with multimodal or visual analysis of media
- Familiarity with ethical considerations when working with social media data
Pay: £17.34 per hour plus holiday entitlement.
Hours: Part time
How to apply: Please send your CV and a brief statement on why you are interested in the role and why you would be a good fit for the position,