I have been awarded a small grant by the John Rylands Research Institute to employ a Research Assistant to work on some Persian language manuscripts here in Manchester. If you are interested in the role described please get in touch with me asap at edmond.smith@manchester.ac.uk and we can talk about it further. Ideally you would start working in November but the schedule is very flexible so we can fit your time on this project around other demands on your time.

Person specification: Advanced Persian language skills (essential), experience of using early modern Persian manuscripts (desirable).

Pay and hours: The rate for a PhD student will be set at grade 5 (£14.46 per hour) and the work will be for up to six hours a week*, spread over the coming three terms (250 hours total). The schedule will be casual and we will schedule work to fit with your own research which is obviously the priority!

*It is strongly advised that PhD students should work no more than 6 hours per week in paid employment alongside the PhD programme. This is in line with UKVI requirements.

Your duties: As Research Assistant you will be working a project called ‘Economic Behaviours in the John Ryland Library’s Persian Manuscripts’. Your time will be spent translating and transcribing Persian text (50%), tagging and annotating texts for analysis through corpus linguistics (30%), and the interpretation of this material through network analysis (20%). Don’t worry, you will receive all the training you need for the digital humanities elements of the role. If you would like there will be an option to co-author a paper with me to present at a conference and possibly develop into an article.

Your development: This role (in addition to monetary reward!) will give you an opportunity to work with some really exciting material, learn skills from digital humanities, and develop their CV with conference and possibly publication experience.

Related