Vacant Position: Research Engineer (M/W) for the “Chinese Human Trafficking and Slaving Database” (Claude Chevaleyre)

Expected date of employment: 15 Mar 2020
Paris, France

The Lyons Institute of East Asian Studies (IAO) is a center for research in human and social sciences. It brings together scholars from fields such as anthropology, law, economics, geography, history, literature, philosophy and political sciences. The primary focus of their work is East and South-East Asia, especially China, Korea, Japan, Laos, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

By mapping and analyzing networks of human trafficking in early modern China, the project “Chinese Human Trafficking and Slaving Database” questions the role of China as exclusively a purveyor of forced/slave labour for the colonial Indian Ocean world. Using the methods of digital humanities, it will contribute to the advancement of knowledge in a domain which is a blind spot in slavery and Asian history. It also promotes the emergence of a new research field in which European collaborative dynamics and Lyon are to play a major role. This pilot-projects intends to develop both a database of slaving and human trafficking and a platform of sources annotation (using Freizo) to map and quantify these phenomena. It also intends to produce a large sample of segmented and structured texts to train an OCR model for late imperial administrative and judicial sources. The person recruited will collaborate to develop the project in collaboration with Claude Chevaleyre. He/she will segment the documents hosted on the Freizo platform, input fulltext transcriptions and will identify in the corpus information relevant to the project. He/she will also coordinate the activities of the project with those of the “Exploring Slave Trade in Asia” project (IISH, Amsterdam).

Reference : UMR5062-AURLEJ-001

Workplace : LYON 07

Date of publication : Monday, January 06, 2020

Type of Contract : FTC Scientist

Contract Period : 5 months

Expected date of employment : 15 March 2020

Proportion of work : Full time

Remuneration : From € 2423€ / month depending on experience (gross salary)

Desired level of education : PhD

Experience required : Indifferent

Detailed information on the context and conditions: https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/UMR5062-AURLEJ-001/Default.aspx?lang=EN