job openings: digital Coptic palaeography

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Lots of positions involving Coptic in Europe, these days. This one is on the computer science side of digital humanities. The deadline is not far off: 1 July.
Universität Basel, Dept. Altertumswissenschaften, Petersgraben 51, CH–4051 Basel
Technical lead in Digital Humanities
The four–years project “Reuniting fragments, identifying scribes and characterizing
scripts: the Digital paleography of Greek and Coptic papyri” funded by the Swiss
National Science Foundation and hosted in the University of Basel is opening a
50% position for a technical lead.
This person will be in charge of the creation and improvement of tools allowing
writer identification and script classification from ancient papyri written in Greek
and Coptic.
The applicant must testify advanced skills in one or several of the following topics:
Handwritten Document Analysis, Digital Palaeography, Writer Identification,
Handwriting Recognition, Computer vision, Pattern Recognition, Feature
Representation, Machine Learning.
For any information, or to submit an application, please contact the project leader
at i.marthot–santaniello@unibas.ch
Job Start: 01 September 2018
Working hours: 21 h/week for 4 years (gross annual salary: 42,000 CHF)
Requirements: PhD–holders in Computer Sciences and experience in the topic(s)
mentioned above will be preferred. Applicants with Master and/or able to attest a
strong experience and motivation in the field will be considered.
Application: a cover letter and a CV by July 1, 2018 at the latest
Project Summary
Greek and Coptic papyri preserved in the sands of Egypt are one of
our main sources for Classical and early Christian literature as well as for
the ancient History of the eastern Mediterranean world from the Hellenistic
period to the Middle Ages. However, the texts are often incomplete, broken
accidentally during the course of time or intentionally, two small pieces
being more valuable than a single larger one on the antiquities market.
Palaeography, as the study of ancient writings, has two main fields of
application: one is to identify the specific handwriting of one individual over
several fragments. The second is to provide dating arguments in the
absence of other criteria, Greek and Coptic scripts having evolved over
time. The present research project aims to lay the foundation for an online
interface through which papyrologists would be able to look for similar – or
identical – handwritings to a given papyrus and typical samples of writings
for a given period. To reach this ambitious goal, this project will first focus
on three delimitated and complementary case studies: the papyri containing
Homer’s Iliad, the archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito (6th c. A.D.) which is
the richest archive of the Byzantine period and the Coptic archive of Papas
which were found broken in a jar and thus are a real jigsaw puzzle.