25 representatives from the technical READ partners met in Valencia from May 3 to 6. Prof. Joan Andreu and Prof. Enrique Vidal hosted the researchers and developers at the Polytechnical University of Valencia.
Has a PhD in History, completed his archival traineeship at the State Archives Bremen. Was Archivist at the Hessian Main State Archives in Wiesbaden, since 2001 Director of the Hessian State Archives Marburg, since 2016 also Director of the Hessian Regional Archives. Head of the Hessian Historical Commission and member of numerous commissions and societies, lecturer at the Philipps-University Marburg and the Archives School Marburg.
Studied History, Auxiliary sciences of History (with an emphasis on Diplomatics and Edition Philology), Classical Philology and Medieval Latin from 1994-2000. Was assistant at the Institute for Medieval History at the Philipps-University Marburg. Received his PhD on forgery of charters in 2005. Since May 2010 Archivrat at the Hessian State Archives Marburg, since 2014 leading consultant for indexing management and research funding at the Hessian Regional Archives. Numerous publications, especially concerning Diplomatics and Edition Philology.
Works as Senior Project Manager of the Digitisation and Digital Preservation group at the Department for German Language and Literature at the University of Innsbruck. He received his Ph.D. for a dissertation on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). From 1991 to 2002 he worked as a research assistant for German Language and Literature and switched than to the university library as head of department for Digitisation and Digital Preservation. In 2012 he returned to the Department for German Language and Literature and aims now to build up services and tools for the Digital Humanities. Günter Mühlberger was responsible for several national and international projects, e.g. LAURIN (digitization of newspaper clippings, 1998-2000), METADATA ENGINE (structural metadata extraction and OCR for gothic letters, 2000-2003), reUSE (2003-2006, digital preservation), IMPACT (sub-project leader for text Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents
recognition, 2008-2012), Digitisation on Demand / eBooks on Demand (DoD, EOD, 2006-2012), tranScriptorium (work package leader for data management for handwritten text recognition) and EU Newspaper (member of the executive board, OCR processing and enrichment of newspapers). From 2016 onwards he will coordinate the Horizon 2020 Project READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) which will focus on Handwritten Text Recognition and make the technology available via the Transkribus Platform.
Roger Labahn received his doctoral degree in 1987 and finished his habilitation in 1994, both in Discrete Mathematics / Combinatorics. Since then he was Senior Researcher with academic teaching duties in various fields of basic, applied and discrete Mathematics. His major interest and working area changed to Machine Learning and Neural Networks with strong focus on application oriented research and algorithm design and software development. He led the various research projects of the CITlab groups with several collaborators resp. PhD students for developing algorithms and technologies for handwritten text recognition based on state-of-the-art concepts of Computational Intelligence.
Enrique Vidal is professor of Computer Science at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Research topics: Pattern Recognition, Multimodal Interaction, Handwritten Text Recognition and Human Language Technology.
Basilis Gatos worked as Director of the Research Division in the field of digital preservation of old newspapers at Lambrakis Press Archives and as Managing Director of R&D Division in the field of document management and recognition at BSI S.A. in Greece. He is currently working as a Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos” in Athens, Greece. His main research interests are in Image Processing and Document Image Analysis, OCR and Pattern Recognition. He has more than 150 publications in journals and international conference proceedings and has participated in several research programs funded by the European community. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) and program committee member of several international Conferences and Workshops. He is co-organiser of the International Conference of Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) in 2014 and of the International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2016) that will be held next year in Santorini, Greece.
Stefan Fiel is born in Feldkirch, Austria, and studied at the Technical University of Vienna where he received his MSc. degree in Visual Computing in 2010. He gained experience as a project collaborator in projects at the Computer Vision Lab. He was involved in the “DIR – Document Information Retrieval” project where his task is writer identification and writer retrieval. Currently he is writing his PhD thesis with the topic “Novel Methods for Writer Identification and Retrieval”. His research interests are Cultural Heritage Applications and Document Analysis Applications.
Louise Seaward is a historian with an interest in eighteenth-century France and the history of the book. She works as a research associate at the Bentham Project at University College London. She is the coordinator of Transcribe Bentham, a scholarly crowd-sourcing initiative to transcribe the writings of the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).
Christian Sieber is head of the division for Edition Projects at the State Archives of Canton of Zurich and head of the project of the Electronic Publication of Law Sources of the Canton of Zurich before 1798 (since 2010). Studies in general history, auxiliary science of history and constitutional law at the university of Zurich, master’s thesis on late medieval Swiss history. 1990-2010 research assistant in different editing projects (chronicle of Aegidius Tschudi, 16th c. / charters of the Zurich State Archives, 15th c. / monastery chronicle Acta Murensia, 12th c.). Publications on late medieval Swiss history and historiography in the Middle Ages and in Humanism.
Dr István Kecskeméti is the head of unit at Collection Management Division at the National Archives of Finland. He is responsible for preservation, conservation and digitization of the collections as well as for external projects (from Nov 2007-). He has BA in paper / photograph conservation from University of Göteborg, Sweden, from 1996, MA in Museology from University of Jyväskylä, Finland in 2006 and PhD in Museology from the same University (2008). His PhD thesis was about collection management of archival and photographic collections.
Sebastian Colutto studied computer science at the University of Innsbruck. He worked as a research assistant and received his PhD in 2012 in the field of image processing under the supervision of Univ.-Prof. Dr. Otmar Scherzer. Since, he worked as a software engineer in the EU project “Transcriptorium” where he and his colleagues are responsible for the development of the “Transkribus” platform.
Kerstin Muff studied Theatre, Film and media Studies in Leipzig and Vienna and joined the ICARUS team in 2012. She has worked for several EU-funded projects: ENArC – European Network on Archival Cooperation, APEx- Archives Portal Europe network of excellence and is now working as communications and project manager within co:op – community as opportunity. the creative archives’ and users’ network. She furthermore oversees the publication of the ICARUS magazine “insights” as editor-in-chief.
Elisabeth Steiger was born in Landstuhl, Germany. She studied German philology and European ethnology / cultural anthropology at the University of Würzburg. She joined ICARUS in 2011. Before her employment at the University of Cologne she has worked at the city archives of Speyer and the University of Bayreuth. She is responsible for the European Archival Blog and the social media activities of the co:op-project. Furthermore she is working as a freelance journalist for a news agency.
Günter Mühlberger works as Senior Project Manager of the Digitisation and Digital Preservation group at the Department for German Language and Literature at the University of Innsbruck. He received his Ph.D. for a dissertation on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). From 1991 to 2002 he worked as a research assistant for German Language and Literature and switched than to the university library as head of department for Digitisation and Digital Preservation. In 2012 he returned to the Department for German Language and Literature and aims now to build up services and tools for the Digital Humanities. Günter Mühlberger was responsible for several national and international projects, e.g. LAURIN (digitisation of newspaper clippings, 1998-2000), METADATA ENGINE (structural metadata extraction and OCR for gothic letters, 2000-2003), reUSE (2003-2006, digital preservation), IMPACT (sub-project leader for text recognition, 2008-2012), Digitisation on Demand / eBooks on Demand (DoD, EOD, 2006-2012), tranScriptorium (work package leader for data management for handwritten text recognition) and EU Newspaper (member of the executive board, OCR processing and enrichment of newspapers). From 2016 onwards he will coordinate the Horizon 2020 Project READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) which will focus on Handwritten Text Recognition and make the technology available via the Transkribus Platform.
Studium der Verfassungs-geschichte, Sozial- und Wirtschafts-geschichte, Wirtschafts-wissenschaften und Historischen Geographie in Bonn. Promotion an der Universität Bonn über den Erzbergbau im Sauerland. Archivreferendariat im Deutschen Bundesarchiv und an der Archivschule Marburg. Seit 2012 in der Abteilung Deutsches Reich (R) des Bundesarchivs in Berlin-Lichterfelde tätig, bis März 2014 als Referent für Wirtschaft und Finanzen, seit April 2014 als Referent für die Dokumentation der Judenverfolgung.
The common weblog of the International Centre for Archival Research (ICARUS) and The European Branch of the International Council on Archives (EURBICA)