Graduate Research Assistant

Graduate Research Assistant | University of Kansas

The Institute for Public & Social Research is seeking a master's student to serve as a Graduate Research Assistant on an interdisciplinary project developing a humanities-centered large language model prototype for art-historical research. The project is developing a functional prototype grounded in a bilingual cultural database curated and interpreted by art historians. The database includes oral-history interviews, archival documents, visual materials, scholarly research, and structured metadata on three generations of women printmakers in the Yoshida family: Fujio, Chizuko, and Ayomi Yoshida. Rather than relying primarily on general-purpose training data, the prototype will use a carefully documented collection of domain-specific materials that reflect expert knowledge of Japanese woodblock printmaking, gender, artistic labor, and transnational circulation. The system will enable researchers, students, educators, and members of the public to ask questions about the Yoshida women and receive responses grounded in identifiable source materials. The prototype will also provide a foundation for usability testing. The proof-of-concept prototype will then be used to apply for external funding to build a future system for educators, students, and the public. The Graduate Research Assistant will work closely with faculty investigators, art historians, and technical collaborators. The position will involve independent research, data curation, support for prototype development, evaluation design, documentation, and coordination across the project's humanities and technical components. For this task, the student will work directly with EECS and I2S faculty members to complete this part of the project.

35% - Research and Data Curation

• Prepare, clean, structure, and document bilingual research materials for use in the prototype.
• Review oral-history interviews, archival documents, visual materials, scholarly publications, and structured metadata for accuracy, consistency, and completeness.
• Develop and maintain documentation connecting project data to its original sources.
• Identify gaps, inconsistencies, duplication, and potential biases within the project database.
• Assist with the development of metadata standards, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and data-governance procedures.
• Apply project protocols to protect sensitive oral history, archival, and culturally significant materials.

35% - Prototype Development and Evaluation

• Collaborate with technical team members on the development of a retrieval-augmented generation or comparable prototype architecture.
• Define representative research questions, user scenarios, and evaluation criteria in consultation with art-history experts.
• Develop structured test sets for assessing prototype performance.
• Evaluate model responses for factual accuracy, source fidelity, bilingual functionality, interpretive usefulness, and appropriate attribution.
• Analyze hallucinations, citation errors, translation problems, omissions, and failures to preserve historical or cultural context.
• Assess the prototype's ability to distinguish documented evidence from scholarly interpretation.
• Recommend revisions to prompts, retrieval procedures, metadata, source documentation, or evaluation methods based on testing results.
• Maintain systematic records of testing methods, findings, and prototype revisions.

30% - Project Coordination and Collaboration

• Participate in regular research-team meetings and provide progress updates.
• Help maintain project timelines, shared documentation, data inventories, and testing records.
• Communicate technical findings clearly to humanities researchers and communicate art-historical requirements clearly to technical collaborators.

Required Qualifications

1. Current enrollment in a relevant master's degree program.
2. Graduate-level research experience in computer science and related fields, as evidenced by application materials.
3. Demonstrated ability to conduct independent scholarly research, as evidenced by application materials.
4. Strong analytical writing and communication skills, as evidenced by application materials.
5. Professional experience which required strong organizational skills and attention to detail, as evidenced by application materials.
6. Demonstrated ability to manage multiple research tasks and meet project deadlines, as evidenced by application materials.

Preferred Qualifications

1. Experience preparing structured data for computational research, as evidenced by application materials.

Position Requirements

During the semester term of the appointment, the student hourly must be enrolled in no fewer than 6 credit hours. For summer periods the student hourly must: (1) have been enrolled in no less than 6 hours in the past spring semester or (2) be pre-enrolled in the upcoming fall semester in no less than 6 hours or (3) be enrolled in summer session or (4) be admitted to study in the upcoming fall semester. Student Hourlies may be undergraduate or graduate students. (Exceptions granted for GRA/GTA/GA appointments DO NOT apply to Student Hourly appointments).

Employment Conditions

(1) Student employees are not eligible for remote work arrangements unless an exception is approved by the unit leadership and HR. (2) This is an hourly/non-exempt position. A student employee cannot hold an hourly/non-exempt position and a salaried/exempt graduate or undergraduate position (GRA/GTA/GA/RUA/RGA) concurrently.

Additional Candidate Instruction

In addition to the online application, the following documents are required to be considered for this position:

• Curriculum vitae or resume
• Cover letter describing relevant research experience and explaining how the applicant meets the required and preferred qualifications

Applicants may also submit an optional portfolio or work sample demonstrating relevant experience with digital humanities, data curation, archival research, Japanese-language materials, metadata, programming, or generative AI. Application deadline is Thursday, 10/22/2026, by 11:59PM Central Standard Time.