Student Assistant in Digital Social Sciences; computational approaches

Introduction

UNIL is a leading international teaching and research institution, with over 5,000 employees and 17,000 students split between its Dorigny campus, CHUV and Epalinges. As an employer, UNIL encourages excellence, individual recognition and responsibility.

The Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) of the University of Lausanne is advertising a position for a Student Assistant in Digital Social Sciences (computational approaches).

• Start date:
  
  1 March 2026 (or to be discussed)
• Contract duration: 6 months (potentially renewable)
• Workload: 40%
• Place of work:
  Lausanne-Dorigny
• Salary:
  According to the salary scale for student assistant positions.

40% of the workload will be devoted to supporting research tasks unrelated to your own personal research and activities linked to the life of the host unit. The position consists of collecting and analyzing data from social networks, discussion forums and online media related to family sociology.

• Index and collect data from social media platforms (e.g. X/Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.) using Python.
• Clean, structure and document datasets in preparation for analysis.
• Contribute to qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis (e.g. identifying themes, sentiment, interpretive frames).
• Take part in data visualization and in drafting preliminary reports on the results.
• Regularly participate in team meetings and ensure clear and up-to-date documentation of the work carried out.

• Enrolled in a Master’s program in social sciences, data science, computational linguistics, digital humanities, or a related field.
• Experience with Python (in particular with libraries such as pandas, Beautiful Soup, snscrape or equivalent).
• Strong written command of French and German;
  English and/or Italian are an asset.
• Demonstrated interest in research on social media, discourse and digital societies.
• Shows rigor, reliability and the ability to work independently.

Assets

• Knowledge of text analysis methods, natural language processing (NLP) or discourse analysis.

We offer a nice working place in a multicultural, diverse and dynamic academic environment. Opportunities for professional training, a lot of activities and other benefits to discover.

• Motivation letter
• Academic CV with copies of university degrees and transcripts of grades obtained.

Please send your complete application file in Word or PDF format.

Final date to receive applications: 23 January 2026
.

UNIL is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion within its community; ensuring an open and respectful environment that is conducive to personal development; offering working conditions that facilitate work-life balance; supporting early career researchers.