The University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business, is looking for a Postdoc researcher/data scientist to work on a data collection project involving securities and issuers listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange (Digitalisation Project on Dutch Financial History).
The researcher will be active in “Gauging Past Performance: Creating Financial Metadata for Economics, Finance, and Economic History in The Netherlands”, a project subsidized by Platform Digital Infrastructure Social Sciences and Humanities, 2020-2024 (€ 830,000, Main Applicant: Prof. Herman de Jong, UG).
The aim of this groundbreaking project is to build a comprehensive information system holding Dutch corporate and stock exchange data for the period 1796-1980. Historians and economists collaborate closely to provide new and vital data for understanding the long-term evolution of Dutch financial markets, firms, and public finance in their societal context. This project supplies innovative standards of documentation, bringing together metadata formats and an architecture facilitating the next generation of data extraction and enrichment systems from historical sources.
Duration: an appointment for a period of two years and three months
Tasks
As a Data Scientist on Dutch Financial History, the main tasks will be:
- Supervise, in collaboration with an experienced research assistant, a team of student assistants hand-collecting, coding, and linking basic reference data for the unique identification of securities and their issuers.
- Check, clean, code, and prepare data for import in the database.
Extract additional data from scans of printed serial sources - Assess the feasibility of extracting and linking security prices from the official price published in newspapers.
- Train and assist PhD students and researchers working with the data in querying the database and processing the data.
- Create an online and publicly accessible interface to browse, search and visualize the data alongside images of source documents.
- Document the data and the data collection, and update manuals (e.g. after a database upgrade).
Salary
The position of Data Scientist for a Digitalisation Project on Dutch Financial History covers
- a salary depending on qualifications and work experience starting from a minimum of € 3,974 gross per month to a maximum of € 5,439 gross per month;
- 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% year-end bonus and participation in a pension scheme for employees;
- favorable tax treatment may apply to non-Dutch applicants.
Job Requirements
Applicants should have the following qualifications:
- PhD in Economics, History, Digital Humanities, or Computer Science
- proficiency in relational databases (Oracle SQL in particular
- programming in Python
- basic understanding of Java
- experience with machine learning, OCR, layout analysis, and named-entity recognition.
Application Process
Interested applicants can apply and ensure that they attach the following:
- a motivation letter
- a complete curriculum vitae
- two letters of recommendation
- a short statement of research accomplishments and future research goals.
To apply as a Data Scientist for a Digitalisation Project on Dutch Financial History, click here.
Application Deadline: August 31, 2022.
For more information, visit the official site.
