Research Engineer – LAURA Project (ANR-25-CE38-0700)
Organisation/Company Université Marie et Louis Pasteur Research Field History » Medieval history Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions Postdoc Positions Application Deadline 1 Sep 2026 - 17:00 (Europe/Paris) Country France Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 35:00 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No
Offer Description
The engineer, hired on a 24-month fixed-term contract, will oversee all stages of the construction of a prosopographic database based on the medieval archives of a Parisian university college: he/she will correct and train the artificial intelligence at each stage of the process, with the aim of automating the process of identifying individuals. He/She will work within the “Culture, Ideas, and Transmission in the West (12th–17th Centuries)” team of the Lucien Febvre Center (CLF), under the supervision of Prof. Thierry Kouamé. The engineer will operate at the intersection of digital sciences and the humanities and social sciences: he/she will be required to collaborate with partners as diverse as the National Archives, teams of historians, and teams of computer scientists.The position is based in Besançon, but the engineer will be required to travel to Paris on a regular basis.
LAURA Project (2026–2030)
Objective: Knowledge base enrichment from uncertain medieval prosopographical data
Number of researchers involved: 24 (faculty members, researchers, and curators)
Number of contract staff recruited: 6 (doctoral students and engineers)
The LAURA Project focuses on the enrichment and utilization of prosopographic databases covering the medieval period, for which data are often scarce, fragmented, and uncertain. Medieval individuals may indeed be referred to by various names and associated with different places, roles, or events, depending on the source used to document these facts. Due to this uncertainty, many identification rules remain poorly explained, even by historians themselves.
This project therefore aims to bring together historians, archivists, and computer scientists to collaborate on this identification process, based on the prosopography of a medieval population, from data extraction to the enrichment of the knowledge base and its utilization. In this context, the CLF research engineer will be responsible for building a prosopographic database using artificial intelligence, which he/she will refine and train at each stage of development in order to achieve automation of the identification process.
Responsibilities of the research engineer
- Correct and validate the HTR for the documents digitized by the National Archives
To support the digitization project led by the National Archives, the engineer will be responsible for quality control and proofreading of HTR transcriptions of documents from the medieval archives of a Parisian university college.
- Tag named entities in OCR-processed documents to enable their retrieval and analysis
The engineer will identify and tag named entities (places, institutions, roles, people's names, etc.) suggested by the AI in the OCR-processed documents. The goal of this task is to transform these primary sources into a searchable database that can be used for historical research and prosopographic studies.
- Help coordinate the network and promote the project’s scientific findings
The engineer will play an active role in the scientific coordination of the LAURA Project by organizing workshops and seminars with partners and disseminating the research findings through scientific publications.
Selection process
- Open only to university PhD holders
- Fluency in French required (native speaker or C2 level)
- Knowledge of Latin and medieval paleography
- Experience working with databases
- Detailed Curriculum Vitae
- Copy of doctoral degree certificate
- Copy of passport (or equivalent ID document)