Sebastian
Majstorovic

I find the stories in your data.
Data Consultant & Digital Historian | Cologne, Germany | info@storytracer.com | linkedin.com/in/sebastian-majstorovic | storytracer.com

Expertise

  • Applied AI
  • Data wrangling
  • Dataset curation
  • Data visualisation
  • Geovisualisation
  • Content mining
  • Document processing
  • Digital preservation
  • Web archiving
  • No-code tools
  • Remote collaboration
  • Multimedia processing

Digital Skills

Languages & formats
Python, JavaScript, Ruby, SQL, GraphQL, SPARQL, HTML, CSS, CSV, XML, JSON/GeoJSON, Parquet
Frameworks
Haystack, LangChain, spaCy, Jupyter notebooks, Pandas, Streamlit, Gradio, Node.js, Anaconda, OpenCV
Applied AI
NLP, NER, LLMs, Prompt Engineering, Document Q&A, Text Summarization, Semantic Search, Machine Translation, OCR, Face Detection, Film restoration
Data sources
PostgreSQL, DuckDB, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, SQLite, APIs, Vector Stores, RDF Stores, Knowledge Bases, Wikidata, S3, Web Archives, PDFs
Tools
Exploratory.io, Flourish, OpenRefine, Airtable, Baserow, Flowmap, n8n, Flowise, Nomic.ai, ollama, LM Studio
DevOps
Docker, Ansible, Git, AWS, Wasabi, Netlify, Vercel, Google Colab, Self-hosted

Current Projects

CAPASIA: The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism

Jan 2023 - Current
Digital Historian

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  • Use of LLMs to extract tabular data from historical documents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
Co-Founder

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

Work

Eleuther AI

May 2024 - Current
Open Data Specialist

Curation of pre-training Machine Learning datasets from openly licensed and public domain data

Storytracer

Jan 2023 - Current
Digital Historian & Data Consultant
  • 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

Bavarian State Library

Feb 2024 - Apr 2024
Academic Librarian

Digital Librarian in the Eastern European Section

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Jan 2022 - Jan 2023
IT Consultant for Digital Humanities

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

appealing apps

May 2009 - Aug 2016
Software Developer

Freelance full-stack developer of web and mobile applications

Education

Researcher

PhD not completed, received Master of Research in History

University College London

Sep 2016 - Aug 2018
MA, Economy, State & Society: History & Society

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

Grade: Distinction (A)

BA, History & Film Studies

Grade: First Class Degree (A)

Talks (selection)

Open Culture meets Digital Activism: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)

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

"Collaborative Preservation of Cultural Heritage: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)"

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

AWS Europe Kick Off Event

Jun 2022
"Cultural Heritage and the Cloud"

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

Awards

European Commission / Europa Nostra

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

Society of American Archivists

Media appearances (selection)

Volunteering

SUCHO

Feb 2022 - Current
Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online

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

Radio Cavolo

Aug 2019 - Current

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

Professional Memberships

DhD, EADH & ADHO
German, European and International Associations for Digital Humanities
Europeana Network Association
Network for Digital Cultural Heritage professionals
Royal Historical Society
British Historical Society, Early Career Member
VHD
German Historical Society
AG Digitale Geschichtswissenschaft
Digital History working group of the VHD
Museumsbund
German Museum Association

Languages

German
Native speaker
English
Native speaker level
Italian
Intermediate
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Casual
French
Basic