Sebastian Majstorovic, Digital Historian & Data Consultant

International research project at European University Institute funded by ERC Advanced Grant

Responsibilities:

• Technical design of online collaborative research environment
• Data modelling and geovisualisation of research data
• AI-based extraction of people, locations and organisations using NER from historical sources
• Use of LLMs to extract tabular data from historical documents
• Semantic search across large historical corpora

Grassroots volunteer initiative of 1,500+ researchers, librarians and technologists supporting the digital preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage.

Achievements:

• Design of the cloud architecture needed to preserve over 5,000 Ukrainian websites cultural heritage websites and 100TB+ of cultural data
• Fundraised ~ 300,000€ for digitisation hardware for Ukrainian institutions
• Distributed digitisation equipment and cash donations to several dozen institutions
• Partnerships with international organisations, e.g. UNESCO, ICOM, Europeana, Internet Archive, and technology partners, e.g. AWS, Wasabi, Digital Ocean

• Freelance consulting of international clients from the tech, science, and non-profit sectors
• Data wrangling, analysis, and visualization
• Development of information retrieval solutions for large, unstructured document collections
• Experimental comparison of open source AI models, frameworks, libraries, and tools

Digital Librarian in the Eastern European Section

Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Vienna

• Consulting and support for digital research projects
• Technical consulting & budget and personnel cost planning during application submission
• Interlocutor between project leaders, funding bodies, technicians, institute management, and administration

Freelance full-stack developer of web and mobile applications

PhD not completed, received Master of Research in History

Interdisciplinary Eastern European area studies with a specialization in the history of Southeastern Europe; Second Year in Belgrade

Grade: Distinction (A)

Grade: First Class Degree (A)

Opening Keynote at the annual conference of the German Digital Humanities association

Talk on digital preservation and remote grassroots collaboration at the Europeana 2022 conference

Speech at AWS Europe Public Sector kick-off event on the particular needs and use cases for the cloud for non-profit organisations

Grand Prix of the European Heritage Awards in the category Heritage Champions for SUCHO

Co-founder of international volunteer initiative for the emergency rescue and preservation of Ukrainian digital cultural heritage

Co-founder & technical director of researcher-run web radio of the European University Institute