PhD student in digital humanities (4 years, 75%)
The Bit Philology project at the Digital Humanities unit, University of Bern, is offering a fully funded PhD position in the field of digital humanities. The position is available from September 2025, with a duration of four years, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
The Bit Philology project studies born-digital materials in literary archives, with a focus on Swiss collections in French and Italian. As a significant portion of contemporary literature is created digitally, literary archives increasingly include born-digital documents-posing new challenges for their study. The project seeks to develop methods for cataloguing these archives, create prototypes for scholarly editions, and explore authors' creative processes through digital materials. It also aims to train future researchers and advance practices in textual scholarship and digital humanities.
The PhD project's general objective is to enhance the discoverability of born-digital sources through rich archival descriptions. Specifically, it aims to define a conceptual model for describing born-digital materials in literary archives and apply this model to selected case studies. The PhD thesis will be supervised by Prof. Elena Spadini (PI of the Bit Philology project, University of Bern).
• collaborating with the rest of the team;
• working in archives;
• working with a set of OWL ontologies;
• create RDF datasets;
• publishing and presenting your work locally and internationally;
• contributing to the organisation of scholarly events and to the communication strategy of the project.
Participation in teaching is optional.
Prior experience or strong interest in
• born-digital archival records;
• Semantic Web technologies;
• data mining and machine-learning.
Strong motivation to work independently as well as with others within a diverse, interdisciplinary environment.
Self-discipline and creative thinking.
Working proficiency in English and French.
• Work-life balance through flexible work schedules.
• Training opportunities in all areas of the project and related fields.
• A vibrant and interdisciplinary doctoral program.
• Salary according to SNSF regulations (basic monthly gross salary of 3'755 x 13 in 2025).
• Academic CV
• Letter of motivation, explaining how you fit the candidate profile
• One writing sample (e.g. MA thesis or chapter, publication, seminar paper)
• Contact details of two references
Please organise all the documents together into one PDF file and name the file as follows: yourSurname_BitPhil_PhD-A.pdf (e.g. Spadini_BitPhil_PhD-A.pdf).
Application deadline: 31 May 2025.
Interview dates: 23-24 June, 1 and 3 July.