The Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL-University in Paris, France is hiring an Ingénieur d’Etudes in Digital Humanities and Hebrew Literature to work on the ERC Synergy project MiDRASH (Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script) for the team led by Daniel Stökl.
The project undertaken in very close interaction with teams led by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (EPHE, PSL), Nachum Dershowitz (Tel Aviv-University), Avi Shmidman (Bar Ilan University), as well as the National Library of Israel and Haifa University. With a total budget of over 10 million euros, this is the largest publicly funded project in Jewish Studies. It aims to revolutionize our understanding of the literary process, text and manuscript production in Ancient and Medieval Judaism by striving to automatically transcribe ca. 30.000 manuscripts in Hebrew characters until the 16th century, annotate them linguistically, calculate the intertextuality graph and perform a series of case-studies as well as improving or developing the algorithms necessary for that. For a brief presentation of the project please check https://escripta.hypotheses.org/500 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqAWSw-vtn0
Advised by Daniel Stökl and in collaboration with his team members in Paris and the other teams, the researcher will be responsible for computational analyses of the layout of the entire corpus of manuscripts, books and fragments and its interrelation to time, place, genre etc. The researcher will also be involved in the process of improving layout analysis, training and evaluating layout classification and segmentation models and preparing ground truth.
Working Place
Campus Condorcet, Paris
Starting date
1 October 2026
Length of the contract
2 years
Gross salary
2 040-2 200 €/month depending on experience
Qualifications, Knowledge and Experience
Essential
M.A. in Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, Digital Humanities or M.Sc. in Computer Sciences
Very good written and spoken English
Expertise with Hebrew manuscripts
Programming skills, preferably in python.
Expertise in data modeling (XML and/or SQL)
Good communication skills
Team-person
Pluses:
Experience in computational analysis of manuscript data
Hebrew
Aramaic
Judeo-Arabic
French
Selection process
For application please send to daniel.stoekl@ephe.psl.eu
- Letter of motivation
- CV
- If extant: list of publications (including github repo and links to digital publications of data and/or code)
- One recommendation letter