Post-doctoral Research Fellowship: MSCA-IF 2017 at the Department of English and German, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Granada

Professor Encarnacion Hidalgo Tenorio, from the Department of English and German at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF) in this university. Applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (more information in the participant guide: http://sl.ugr.es/097k).

We are a team of experts in various areas such as linguistics, political communication and artificial intelligence. We believe in transdisciplinarity, and share some common interests in research such as corpus-based discourse analysis, computational linguistics and authorship attribution.

We aim to design a system for detecting, tracking, monitoring and studying the discourse of the Islamic State (IS) in the Internet. We understand that language is a powerful tool through which people convince those with whom they communicate to act in a certain way. Thanks to language we build our social identity, we can establish our relationship with people discursively, and represent and distort reality.

Following this line of argument, we will firstly observe how the IS, its information services and recruiters construe their perception of the world; how this multi-addresser interacts with a diverse audience, by taking advantage of the anonymity and immediacy the network promotes; and which strategies they use depending on the addressee. As a result of the classification of traits revealing the identities hidden behind the marks left by speakers in their language use, we will design a softare programme to explore its textual footprint on the Internet.

Given the cross-cutting nature of this project, we will combine several complementry approaches. Discourse analysis will draw on political science and communication science in the digital media to understand the phenomenon a comprehensive perspective, thereby conceptualising the network as an ideal site for the spread of values, mass propaganda and the individualised treatment of each user. In turn, it will employ corpus linguistics methodology. Finally, it will rely on the new developments in artificial intelligence with the aim to design the abovementioned software tool.

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Encarnacion Hidalgo Tenorio (ehidalgo@ugr.es@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)