CEAS Digital Tokugawa Lab: Postgraduate Associate Position

Description

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University invites applications for postgraduate associate positions in the CEAS Digital Tokugawa Lab. The appointment period is from September 1st, 2024 – August 31st, 2025. An earlier start to the appointment may be possible on a case-by-case basis.

The Digital Tokugawa Lab is a working group of one faculty member (Fabian Drixler) and up to four postdoctoral or postgraduate associates who collaborate on one or more shared projects for at least one year. The main project of the Digital Tokugawa Lab has thus far been the Digital Atlas of Tokugawa Japan, which is in the advanced stages of completion. Projects for 2024-2025 will reflect the interest of successful candidates and may fall into three broad categories: historical GIS, historical demography, and climate history.

Historical GIS projects may include:

-       Completing the first public version of the Digital Atlas of Tokugawa Japan or building new capabilities on top of it.

-       Building a Digital Atlas of Meiji Japan based on advanced unpublished work by the Lab.

-       Building a highly detailed map of Japan’s changing coastlines and inland bodies of water across several centuries, based on advanced unpublished work by Fabian Drixler.

-       Extending the coastline changes back to the medieval or ancient period.

Historical demography projects may include:

-       Reconstructing the population of Japan from 1600-1925. Like the Digital Atlas, this project will be highly resolved in space and take novel approaches to modeling uncertainty. It will use and potentially expand a large collection of data compiled by Fabian Drixler and deploy it in several novel estimation techniques.

-       Reconstructing fertility change and household patterns in Tokugawa Japan.

-       A mortality atlas for Tokugawa Japan, drawing primarily on kakochō time series and potentially including survey techniques.

Climate history projects may include:

-       Reconstructing the length of growing seasons in Tokugawa Japan.

-       Mapping climate-related disasters.

-       Integrating the climate history of Japan with that of neighboring areas, in particular Korea.

Applicants are also welcome to propose their own projects if they are either closely connected to one of these themes or concern digital formats for effectively conveying existing insights into Tokugawa history. However, the spirit of the lab is fully collaborative; it is not a space to pursue solitary projects, whatever their intellectual promise.

Postgraduate associates are expected to devote themselves to the collaboration full time (40 hours/week).

For questions, please contact fabian.drixler@yale.edu.

Training:

The postgraduate associates (PGAs) will receive advanced training across the range of skillsets deployed by the Lab to deepen existing expertise or develop in new areas. Since we are inviting applications from a diversity of disciplines, specifics will depend on the PGAs’ individual background and interests. Areas of training may include:

-       Tokugawa and Meiji history.

-       Archival research in Japan.

-       Historical demography.

-       Digital cartography and geospatial analysis (ArcGIS Pro).

-       Construction and management of large historical databases.

-       Approaches to text mining.

-       Methods for efficient data cleaning.

-       Python, advanced Excel functions, and MS Access.

-       The application of simulations to historical reconstruction.

-       Subjects in the methodology and epistemology of history, especially the proper treatment of uncertainty and the synthesis of large bodies of information.

 

Mentoring:

The PGA will work in close collaboration with the PI (Fabian Drixler) and the postdoctoral associates at the lab, sharing an office space with the latter. The PGAs will also be encouraged to become a full member of our Japanese history community as well as other relevant academic communities on campus. While the ideal outcome from these interactions is a web of mentoring relationships, the PI will take ultimate responsibility for mentoring the PGAs and helping them grow toward their professional goals.

 

Education and preferred experience:

The Digital Tokugawa Lab is looking for several skillsets: fluent Japanese, Japanese history (esp. early modern), historical geography, GIS, programming (esp. Python) and computer science, statistics and data science, text mining, natural language processing, demography, economics, environmental history, and hydrology. Excellence in writing is an especially desirable skill. There is no expectation that individual applicants ha