Seeking Student Assistants for Editing XML Documents in SARIT Project

The project “SARIT: Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts” at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” of the University of Heidelberg is seeking to fill two positions as student assistants:

one student assistant at BA/MA level for 40–60 hours/month

one student assistant at MA/PhD level for 30–50 hours/month

from March 1^st until September 30^th, 2016.

You will edit XML documents in conformance to the schema developed in the SARIT project which is a subset of the guidelines developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These documents will become part of SARIT's library of electronic Indic texts.

Knowledge of Sanskrit in the Devanāgarī script and in currently used scientific transliteration models (IAST, etc.) is required, as well as some knowledge of and experience with XML, preferably also TEI. You should be willing and able to acquire necessary skills which you do not yet have, in (guided) self-study.

Successful candidates will be precise, reliable, good at communicating with the other members of the team, and will also be able to keep defined deadlines. Preference will be given to students with a research interest in Classical Indology or a related field. The language of communication in this international project is English; German language skills are desirable, but not necessary.

This position will allow you to acquire and advance practical skills in the main elements of any XML based workflow (encoding, querying, and transforming). To students of Indology, it offers the opportunity to deepen and further develop knowledge of, and reflection on, the structure and characteristics of Sanskrit texts in various genres. It will also provide an opportunity to learn about encoding Indic texts in view of current developments in the digital humanities. Your activities will be documented in the SARIT archive itself, and at the end of your employment you will receive a certificate documenting your achievements and skills.

Please send your application as one PDF document to the SARIT coordinator Liudmila Olalde- Rico (olalde@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de) until 31 January, 2016. Applications should include a CV plus a motivation letter explaining your interest in the SARIT project and in this position.

Further information:

• SARIT:
http://sarit.indology.info, https://github.com/SARIT/SARIT-corpus

• SARIT encoding guidelines:
http://sarit.indology.info/exist/apps/sarit/docs/encoding-guidelines-sim...

• TEI guidelines:
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html