We are currently advertising for a Curator, Newspaper Data to join our news curatorial team. This is a fixed-term post until March 2020, based at our St Pancras site in central London. The post is being advertised as part of the British Library's Heritage Made Digital programme, a major part of which involves digitising 19th century British newspapers, with a special focus on newspapers in a poor or unfit condition.

We are looking for someone who will help us to apply data journalism thinking to this historical news material. The person we are looking for will be responsible for the analysis and creative interpretation of data derived from Heritage Made Digital and related British Library newspaper digitisation projects. They will prepare derived newspaper data sets and promote these for use by researchers. They will work with researchers to develop projects using newspaper data.

In particular we want them to help us produce stylish visualisations using historical newspaper data, working with third-party designers as necessary. A couple of years ago on the Newsroom blog we wrote about the art of the news visualisation, and how this particular branch of data science was helping to illuminate the themes behind the news. We also said that it would be a good idea if such thinking, and with such outputs, could be applied to historical news data. Now we want someone to put those thoughts into action.

The post-holder will need to have a strong background in computer science and data science. They will have experience of working with or developing tools for large content and data volumes, and an interest in nineteenth-century history and/or news and current affairs. It's a terrific opportunity for the right person. Information on how to apply is on the British Library's vacancies site. The deadline for applications is 9 September 2018.