Pending Funding Universität Hamburg invites applications for a Research Associate (database developer/programmer) for the project "The Early Islamic Empire At Work" in accordance with § 28 (3) of Hamburg's Higher Education Act (HmbHG). The position commences on April 1, 2015.
The Early Islamic Empire at Work is a historical research project based at Hamburg University and focused on the question of how the early Islamic empire (7th-10th century CE) functioned on the ground in five of its provinces.

The main task of the applicant will be to develop and implement a database in close cooperation with the research team. The database will contain data on the political and economic elites in the project areas. It will use the MyCoRe platform <http://www.mycore.de>, developed by a number of German institutions, in order to guarantee the maintenance of the database by the University after the end of the project. The database will run on the servers of Hamburg University so it can be accessed by all members of the research project at the same time.
A crucial aspect of the research undertaken in the project involves the spatial analysis of data. The software of choice for this task is QGIS. Therefore, another important task will be the development of an API that connects the database system with QGIS, so we can make queries against the database that can be geographically displayed. In addition, we plan to use the D3.js library for data visualization using maps.
Most of the data used in this project will be in Arabic, so basic familiarity with this language is an advantage, and willingness to get acquainted with the basics is a fundamental requisite. As the project's working language is English, a very good working knowledge of English is absolutely essential. The documentation for MyCoRe is currently only available in German, so a good reading knowledge of German is also indispensable.
Other tasks in the project will include occasional help with the development of the project website and assisting staff with the development of data mining tools implemented in Python.

Deadline for applications is March 15, 2015.

For more info, please refer to the full job description on our website:
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/uhh/stellenangebote/wissenschaftliches-personal/AAI_15-03-15.pdf