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Memberships and affiliations

Member of the DSI Community Libraries.

Member and co-[founder|coordinator] of the DSI Community Digital Humanities.

Member of the working group Editions of DARIAH-CH.

Member of the Zentrum Altertumswissenschaften Zürich (ZAZH).

Member of digital humanities im deutschsprachigen raum (DHd).

Member of SSHOC-CH.

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Current project(s) and activities

Please also look at the Data page for current and past projects' datasets, models, and code.

• In my habilitation project, I will look at Ekphrasis and the capability of LLMs at identifying descriptions of art and architecture in ancient texts.
• In July 2024, I joined Prof. D. Felix K. Maier's chair of Ancient History to establish the AIncient Studies Lab, in which we focus to bring together Artificial Intelligence and historical studies.
• In December 2023, the DIZH innovation program by Prof. Dr. Felix K. Maier has been approved. The Re-Experiencing History project uses AI technology to recreate historical events and moments visually. It aims to develop a web application that converts historical texts into storyboards, comics, or individual images, addressing challenges in representing pre-modern era 'lost' history. The project will semantically enrich historical content and make it accessible through innovative visual interfaces, tackling issues like copyright and historical distortions from AI-generated images. It collaborates with libraries, archives, and historians, bridging computer technology, history, and citizen science.
• We obtained funding for a second phase of the project Bullinger Digital (see "Past projects" below). In this second part, we focus on the semantic indexing of the correspondence. We aim to automatically classify the letters (via various topic modelling techniques) and recognise and link named entities. The second phase also comprises a citizen science campaign during which citizens assist us in correcting and linking named entities and events in the correspondence. We will employ various AI techniques to translate letters from Latin and Early New High German to English and standard German, generate automatic summaries, and allow novel access to this treasure of the 16th century. 

Past projects

• In September 2023, innosuisse approved our application for an Innovation Cheque project with Locomot GmbH. This project aims at making photo archives more accessible to the general public. We will use digitised index cards, a photo, a building, and a card index combined with large language models to re-tell the history of Davos.
• In January 2021, I joined the Bullinger Digital project, which is dedicated to digitalising the correspondence by Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger. The project aims to apply Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to about 3,000 of the over 12,000 letters Bullinger has written and received from many colleagues of his time from all over Europe. The project is kindly funded by the Hasler Foundation, among others, and also involves a partnership with Andreas Fischer from the Department of Informatics at the University of Fribourg and Tobias Hodel from the Digital Humanities group at the University of Bern. We could obtain further funding for a second project phase (see current projects above).
• As of September 2017, I have been collaborating in the impresso project. impresso stands for Integrated Monitoring of Historical Press Corpora. During a three-year project phase, financed by a SNSF Sinergia grant, the DHLAB at the EPFL, the C2DH at the University of Luxembourg, and our department will work on text mining of historical newspapers. My main contribution to this undertaking was the lexical semantic indexing of texts and topic modelling of historical newspaper articles. 
• From 2015 to 2017, I was responsible for the Text+Berg pipeline. The Text+Berg corpus consists of the yearbooks from the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) and is a big multilingual collection of texts with mountaineering as their main topic.
• From 2014 to 2016, I helped compile the Credit Suisse Corpus, which features text in multiple languages from the web news and the available PDF files, as well as scans of the world's oldest banking magazine from 1895.
• From 2015 to 2016, I was a research assistant at the URPP Language and Space and helped build the ArchiMob corpus of recorded speech from people who lived through the Second World War in Switzerland.

... starting a collaboration with the Department of History at the UZH.

... collaborating with the Chair of Systems Desgin at ETH and the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften to track the spread of ideas in correspondence data during the Reformation.

... collaborating with Patrick J. Burns from NYU about Latin language models.

• CAS Hochschuldidaktik at PHZ, June 2024 - June 2025.

I served as a reviewer/on a PC for the following conferences/workshops: