Undergraduate Research Hourly Student

University of Kansas•Lawrence, KS

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Institute for Public & Social Research seeks an undergraduate Computer Science or Computer Engineering student for an interdisciplinary project developing a humanities-centered large language model prototype for art-historical research. The prototype will draw on a bilingual cultural database curated and interpreted by art historians, including oral-history interviews, archival documents, visual materials, scholarly research, and structured metadata about three generations of women printmakers in the Yoshida family: Fujio, Chizuko, and Ayomi Yoshida. The project emphasizes a carefully documented, domain-specific collection reflecting expert knowledge of Japanese woodblock printmaking, gender, artistic labor, and transnational circulation. The system is intended to provide responses to researchers, students, educators, and members of the public that are grounded in identifiable sources, and to serve as a foundation for usability testing and future external funding applications. The student will work closely with faculty investigators, art historians, and technical collaborators, and directly with EECS and I2S faculty members. The work includes independent research, bilingual data curation, prototype-development support, evaluation design, documentation, and coordination between humanities and technical project components. The student must meet student-hourly enrollment requirements: during the semester appointment, enrollment in at least 6 credit hours is required. For summer appointments, the student must have been enrolled in at least 6 hours in the prior spring, be pre-enrolled in at least 6 hours for the upcoming fall, be enrolled in summer session, or be admitted for the upcoming fall. Student employees are not eligible for remote work unless an exception is approved by unit leadership and HR. This is an hourly/non-exempt position; student employees cannot concurrently hold an hourly/non-exempt position and a salaried/exempt graduate or undergraduate appointment listed in the posting. Applicants must submit a curriculum vitae or resume and a cover letter describing relevant experience and explaining how they meet the required and preferred qualifications. The application deadline is October 21, 2026, at 11:59 PM Central Standard Time.

Requirements

Currently enrolled as an undergraduate student in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.
Undergraduate-level courses in computer science and related fields.
Professional experience demonstrating strong organizational skills and attention to detail, as evidenced by application materials.
During the semester term of the appointment, enrollment in at least 6 credit hours.
For summer appointments, must meet one of the stated enrollment conditions: have been enrolled in at least 6 hours in the prior spring semester; be pre-enrolled in at least 6 hours in the upcoming fall semester; be enrolled in summer session; or be admitted to study in the upcoming fall semester.
Submit a curriculum vitae or resume and a cover letter describing relevant experience and explaining how the applicant meets required and preferred qualifications.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with AI.

Responsibilities

Prepare, clean, structure, and document bilingual research materials for 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 original sources.
Identify gaps, inconsistencies, duplication, and potential biases in the project database.
Assist in developing metadata standards, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and data-governance procedures.
Apply project protocols to protect sensitive oral-history, archival, and culturally significant materials.
Collaborate with technical team members on 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 whether the prototype distinguishes 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.
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 art-historical requirements clearly to technical collaborators.