Research Associate - Exploring Human Perception of Data Visualisations

Location: Oxford Road

Hours Per Week: 35 hours per week

Contract Duration: Fixed term for 3 years (36 months)

BACKGROUND

We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Research Associate to join an established research team examining how people process and interpret data visualisations.

Data visualisations are ubiquitous and used in many contexts to communicate key aspects of a dataset to both expert and non-expert audiences. Interpretation of data visualisations is influenced by factors including design choices made by the designer, as well as by perceptual and other biases on the part of those viewing the visualisations. Recent work conducted by our team has shown that the ways in which people interpret data visualisations can be influenced by graphical features that are associated with how the data are plotted. For example, judgements of the degree of the strength of correlation between two variables can be influenced by the opacity and the size of the data points in the associated data visualisation. The research conducted in the scope of the advertised post will explore the role of the manipulation of other features on the interpretation, beliefs, decision making etc. that follows from viewing data visualisations.

Overall Purpose of the Job

The current role is for an experienced Research Associate to conduct experimental work exploring how people interpret data visualisations. The successful candidate will design, program, and deploy experiments using tools such as PsychoPy and Pavlovia to measure people’s interpretations of a variety of data visualisations. The successful candidate will analyse the data and lead the drafting of research outputs associated with the findings. Our team conducts research in a fully open and transparent manner and experience/engagement with software/tools such as RStudio, Quarto, git, Docker etc. to enable this is expected.

Manchester has a long and distinguished track record in the research and teaching of core Computer Science, and across interfaces to adjacent disciplines. Founded upon the pioneering work of Williams, Kilburn and Turing, we were the first academic Department of Computer Science in the UK and one of the first to run an undergraduate programme. Our research strength is reflected in consistently strong returns in UK research assessment exercises (5* in RAE 2000, 2nd in Research Power in RAE 2008, and ranked equal 1st for research environment in REF2014 and REF2021).

The Department is strongly committed to promoting equality and diversity, including the Athena SWAN charter for gender equality in higher education. The Department holds a Bronze Award for good practice in relation to gender including flexible working arrangements, family-friendly policies, and support to allow staff to achieve a good work-life balance. We positively welcome applications from women for this post. For further information, please visit: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/connect/jobs/equality-diversity/awards/athena-swan/

As an equal opportunities employer we welcome applicants from all sections of the community regardless of age, sex, gender (or gender identity), ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and transgender status.  All appointments are made on merit.

Please note that we are unable to respond to enquiries, accept CVs or applications from Recruitment Agencies

Enquiries about the vacancy, shortlisting and interviews:
Name: Andrew Stewart
Email: Andrew.J.Stewart@manchester.ac.uk

General enquiries:

Email: People.Recruitment@manchester.ac.uk

Technical support: Email: https://jobseekersupport.jobtrain.co.uk/support/home

This vacancy will close for applications at midnight on the closing date.

Please see the link below for the Further Particulars document which contains the person specification criteria.

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