Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 334.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2023-12-04 20:32:09+00:00
        From: Barbara McGillivray <barbara.mcgillivray@kcl.ac.uk>
        Subject: PhD opportunity at King's College London

A fully funded PhD position is now available at King’s College London on the
project “‘Lost for words’: semantic search in the Find Case Law service of The
National Archives”, a Collaborative Doctoral Award received by King’s College
London in collaboration with The National Archives and funded by the London Arts
& Humanities Partnership (LAHP). This interdisciplinary project is an exciting
opportunity to work in natural language processing (particularly computational
semantics and information retrieval) applied to legal texts and digital
humanities.

About the project:

Access to case law is vital for safeguarding the constitutional right of access
to justice. It enables members of the public to understand their position when
facing litigation and to scrutinise court judgements. Since April 2022, UK court
and tribunal decisions are preserved by The National Archives’ Find Case Law
service as freely accessible online public records. This project seeks to
improve Find Case Law by enhancing it with meaning-sensitive (semantic) search
functionality. It will study how individuals without legal training use language
to navigate court judgments and it will develop tools to facilitate this
navigation. In most digital cultural heritage catalogues, while we can search
for words within the metadata describing their records, we cannot search for
records based on the meaning of words contained within these records, for
example the different words to refer to “knife crime”. Therefore, users’ access
to collection is determined by their ability to articulate their information
need precisely. Recent advances in natural language processing unlock new
possibilities for querying documents via state-of-the-art semantic search.
Incorporating such search capabilities in the Find Case Law collection is
crucial for democratising access to digital collections, helping expose the
social impact of how the law is written.



Skills required 

Essential:  
·                     Experience with Natural Language Processing research and
applied work, including developing new tools.  
·                     Interest in working with UK case law for improving access
to justice 

Desirable:  
·                     Background in law or legal research. 
·                     Experience working with digital archives  
·                     Knowledge of User experience (UX) research  
·                     Knowledge of lexical semantics.  
·                     Experience with semantic search.  
·                     Experience with NLP applied to legal texts. 

  
About application process:

Applicants will need to submit an application for a PhD in Digital Humanities at
King’s (https://tinyurl.com/ycxekhzv ) and an application for the LAHP
(https://www.lahp.ac.uk/prospective-students/collaborative-doctoral-awards-
projects-available/). Both applications need to be submitted by 26 January 2024
at 5pm.

Application Deadline: 26-Jan-2024

Web Address for Applications: https://lahp.flexigrant.com/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=h
ttps%3a%2f%2flahp.flexigrant.com%2fstartapplication.aspx%3fid%3d12709

For queries specific to the project, please contact the project’s lead
supervisor Barbara McGillivray on
barbara.mcgillivray@kcl.ac.uk<mailto:barbara.mcgillivray@kcl.ac.uk>  



Barbara McGillivray | @BarbaraMcGilli<https://twitter.com/BarbaraMcGilli>
Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation and lead of MA programme
in Digital Humanities
Group lead of the Computational Humanities Research
Group<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/computational-humanities-research-group>
Room 3.28, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand
Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
Group lead of the Computational Humanities Research Group at King’s College
London<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/computational-humanities-research-group>
Turing Fellow<https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/researchers/barbara-mcgillivray>,
The Alan Turing Institute
Editor-in-chief of Journal of Open Humanities
Data<https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/>


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