Text Mining Student Specialist

The Position

Job Title: Text Mining Student Specialist

Location/Department: Research & Learning Services, Seattle

Rate: $22.37/hr

Hours: 19.5 hours/week

Positions available: 1

Date posted: January 29, 2026

Closing date: February 12, 2026

Start date: March 30, 2026 (negotiable)

Duties

• General Duties:
  • Under the general supervision of the Scholarly Publishing Outreach Librarian, and in collaboration with the eScience Institute, the student chosen for this position will provide technical expertise in text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to UW researchers at all levels. For example, previous projects have included exploring the role of social media in shaping public sentiment during major climate events using a combination of NLP and text mining techniques to analyze relevant data.
  • The Text Mining Specialist will be uniquely positioned to respond to needs identified by the AI Task Force and to adapt to a rapidly evolving technical landscape at the intersection of NLP and AI.
• Duties may include:
  • Consulting and providing support to researchers tackling basic to complex text mining tasks.
  • Leading problem-solving efforts for NLP-related challenges in collaboration with researchers from all disciplines, and developing custom solutions based on NLP best practices (standards, methods, and techniques). This may involve extensive research into techniques and practices to determine the best course of action given the scope of a research problem.
  • Leading the development and presentation of text mining reference and educational materials for integration into classroom instruction.
  • Creating and/or updating online technical subject guides and other LibGuides related to text mining, API use, and related topics.
  • Offering in-person or virtual office hours in the Open Scholarship Commons and/or the eScience Institute.
  • Developing and teaching workshops and asynchronous tutorials on topics related to using text as data for research.
  • Attending planning meetings for relevant work teams and committees to support service development and alignment.
  • Collecting assessment data and providing recommendations for future iterations of text mining services at UW based on experience in the position.
  • Participating in eScience Institute Carpentries workshops as a helper or instructor.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree.
• Experience with web scraping and data extraction using tools like Scrapy, Selenium, or BeautifulSoup.
• Experience applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including text preprocessing, optical character recognition (OCR), topic modeling, vectorization, and sentiment analysis.
• Experience programming in Python and using NLP libraries such as NLTK, spaCy, and Hugging Face Transformers.
• Experience with statistical analysis, causal inference methods, and experimental design.
• Experience developing and refining research questions or problem statements.
• Familiarity with tools and platforms for large-scale data analysis, such as Jupyter Notebooks, Google Colab, or cloud services (e.g., AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Ability to organize unstructured text data and recommend appropriate data storage solutions.
• Ability to clearly explain complex technical procedures in written and multimedia formats.
• Ability to work independently as well as collaboratively in a team environment.
• Capacity to quickly learn and adapt to new and emerging technologies.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience programming in R.
• Ability to work with research computing and shared HPC clusters, including Slurm.
• Experience with deep learning technologies and large language models (LLMs).
• Demonstrated experience integrating and working with APIs such as Web of Science and Crossref TDM.
• Familiarity with library systems and digital scholarship tools, such as LibGuides.