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3 to 5 July 2024

Wednesday, 3 July 2024: The old technology reading room is closed due to the construction work.
On 4 and 5 July 2024, use of this reading room and WiFi access may be affected by construction work. The computers in the reading room are not available.

Rethinking Culture and science
About the speakers

Edited historical map of Europe

Sören Auer

Soeren Auer is Director TIB, Head of research group Data Science and Digital Libraries. Following stations at the universities of Dresden, Ekaterinburg, Leipzig, Pennsylvania, Bonn and the Fraunhofer Society, Prof. Auer was appointed Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Director of the TIB in 2017. Prof. Auer has made important contributions to semantic technologies, knowledge engineering and information systems. He is the author (resp. co-author) of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He has received several awards, including an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, a SWSA ten-year award, the ESWC 7-year Best Paper Award, and the OpenCourseware Innovation Award. He has led several large collaborative research projects, such as the EU H2020 flagship project BigDataEurope. He is co-founder of high potential research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the OpenCourseWare authoring platform SlideWiki.org and the innovative technology start-up eccenca.com. Prof. Auer was founding director of the Big Data Value Association, led the semantic data representation in the Industrial/International Data Space, is an expert for industry, European Commission, W3C and member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Niels Brügger

Niels Brügger - portrait private*

Niels Brügger is Professor in Internet and Media studies, and head of the Centre for Internet Studies as well as of the internet research infrastructure NetLab, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests are web historiography, web archiving, and media theory. Within these fields he has published monographs and a number of edited books as well as articles and book chapters. Recent publications include "The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age" (MIT Press, 2018), "The SAGE Handbook of Web History" (ed. with Ian Milligan, Sage, 2020), and "The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: The Case of National Web domains" (ed. with Ditte Laursen, Routledge, 2020). He is co-founder and Managing Editor of the international journal "Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society" (Taylor & Francis/Routledge). More

Doc. Bojan Cvelfar

Doc. Bojan Cvelfar, PhD, is Archival Councillor and has been Director of the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia since 2013. Since 2017, he has also been a lecturer at the Department of Archives and Records Management at Alma Mater Europeae – European Center Maribor. Before he became Director of the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, he served as the Director of Historical Archives Celje (2001 to 2011) and of the Historical Archives Ljubljana (2011 to 2013). As a historian and archivist, his experiences vary from processing and registering the archival material, to establishing contacts with creators, doing reseach work and actively participating at symposia both at home and abroad. He is the author of numerous scientific and technical articles in the fields of conservation of archival material and historiography. He is a member of several professional groups and committees, among others, he is a member (and president from 1998 to 2002) of the Historical Society Celje and a member of the editioral committees for history magazines Zgodovina za vse (Slovenia), Makedonski arhivist (North Macedonia), Arhivski Vjesnik (Croatia), Zapisi (Serbia). He is also a member of Rotary International. He lives in Celje with his wife and three children.

Julia Fallon

Julia Fallon - portrait private*

Julia Fallon is the chair of the rights statements consortium. At Europeana, she is the manager of the Community and Partner Engagement Team - together we support the development of professionals and organizations working in and around digital cultural heritage. Together we lead the development of our digital programme & a knowledge hub of events, webinars and resources all supporting the sector in their digital transformation journey. Also passionate about supporting emerging professionals & advocating for inclusive and diverse conversations.

Fotis Jannidis

Fotis Jannidis is professor for literary computing at the university of Würzburg in Germany. He studied literature in Trier and wrote a PhD on Goethe and a Habilitation on the theory of character in Munich. His main research interests are the quantitative analysis of literature and the history of the German novel. Nowadays he is especially interested in the history of the German dime novel in the 20th Century. In recent years he was also involved in the creation of a digital edition of Goethe’s Faust (http://faustedition.net/) and in the development of a digital infrastructure for literary studies, TextGrid (https://textgrid.de/en/). When he is not doing digital stuff, he is interested in literary theory, especially narratology.

Minna Karvonen

Minna Karvonen - portrait private*

Minna Karvonen works as a Director of the Division for Art and Cultural Heritage at the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland. Her special areas of interest are digitisation & culture, public libraries in the digital era, and digitisation, accessibility and digital preservation of cultural heritage. Before joining the Ministry, Ms Karvonen has served as Head of Department of Museum sector development and knowledge management at the Finnish Heritage Agency. Ms Karvonen is a current and former member of various bodies and expert groups in the European Union. She has an MA degree in comparative literature, philosophy and sociology.

Maïté Labat

Maïté Labat has a Master degree in History. She worked as a journalist and at the Palace of Versailles before joining the Louvre Museum in 2017. Head of Digital and audiovisual dpt, she's in charge with her team of websites, mobile tools, film production and digital innovation.

Prasanna Oommen

Prasanna Oommen - Portrait Photo: © Maj Rutten

Prasanna Oommen (www.prasannaoommen.de) has been working for 20 years as a public relations officer, moderator (German/English) and author in the fields of culture, education, digitalisation, urban development, development and cooperation, migration & diversity and media. She was a press spokeswoman for various institutions and companies in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hessen and is a former board member and active member of Neue Deutsche Medienmacher*innen e. V.
Prasanna Oommen has studied German, English and Political Science. She is a trained classical dancer (Cologne/Bangalore) and has worked for many years in arts education for children and adults.

Maria Ralli

Maria Ralli is a graduate of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Since 2014, she has been working as a software architect and developer for the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Laboratory of NTUA. She participated in several European projects about managing and reusing the digital cultural heritage of Europe such as EUscreen, EUscreenXL, Europeana Fashion, Europeana Sounds, Photography and E-Space. She has authored code for MINT and participated in the design and implementation of many core features of WITH and CrowdHeritage, working with various Database and Web technologies both on the backend as well as the frontend. She is responsible for writing and reviewing code, packaging and testing the software and ensuring the overall quality and robustness of the labs’s end products.

Sofie Taes

Sofie Taes - portrait private*

Sofie Taes (F) is an alumna of KU Leuven, where she graduated in musicology and Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Since March 2013 she CS Digital at KU Leuven as research assistant and digital curator. She curated several virtual and physical exhibitions for Europeana-related projects (EuropeanaPhotography, Europeana Migration, Europeana Common Culture, Kaleidoscope) and written the accompanying catalogues. Over the past 7 years she has experience in coordinating curatorial and editorial activities in several projects, and has published extensively about CH on platforms such as Europeana and WITH.

Frank Scholze

Frank Scholze succeeded to the post of Director General of the German National Library in January 2020. After completing studies in library science, art history and English, he took part in various digital library projects and was in charge of the user services department at Stuttgart University Library. In 2010, following two years at the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts in Baden-Württemberg, he was appointed director of the library of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Since 2016, he has been a member of the federal executive committee of the German Library Association (dbv) and numerous other scientific committees and councils, including the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation Data Science Society (GFKl). In 2019, he became a member of the editorial committee of “Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie” (Journal of Library Studies and Bibliography). Frank Scholze is also involved in numerous projects in the areas of digital libraries and research information and he was the spokesperson of the electronic publishing working group of the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI).

Harry Verwayen

Harry Verwayen - portrait private*

Harry Verwayen is Executive Director Europeana Foundation, the operator of the Europeana platform. Across Europe, museums, galleries and archives digitize their collections. Europeana supports these organisations in their digital transformation by making these collections available as widely as possible so that people can find and use them. For work, for learning or just for fun. Europeana's work is guided by creative collaboration, supportive teamwork and the idea that sharing and reusing cultural content can positively transform the world. Prior to this Harry worked at the Amsterdam based think tank Knowledgeland where he was responsible for business model innovation in the cultural heritage sector. Harry holds a MA in History from Leiden University and has worked over ten years in the Academic Publishing Industry. Mediocre tennis player, reasonable cook, aspiring photographer. Additional roles: Vice-President Time Machine Organisation and Executive Board IIIF organisation.
Twitter: @hverwayen

Andreas Weber

Andreas Weber is an assistant professor in the department of Science, Technology, and Policy Studies (STePS) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. In his research and teaching he examines the relationship between Science,Technology, and Culture (=STC) from a long-term and global perspective. Since 2016, Dr. Weber is also a researcher in the project "Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives". The research project uses different computational technologies (among which AI) to increase the accessibility of digital natural and cultural heritage collections. Dr. Weber is also co-chair of an annual special session on AI and Digital Heritage (ARTIDIGH 2021) which forms part of the International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART).

*All photos are protected by copyright.

Last changes: 03.11.2020

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