Speakers
Elisabeth Burr
(Emeritus prof. University of Leipzig, founder of the ESU)
Lecture: How and why I became a Digital Humanist and founded the European Summer University
Elisabeth Burr (1952), emeritus professor of Leipzig university, studied Romance, English and German literature and linguistics at the universities of Tübingen, Leeds and Amiens from 1971 to 1980. After having spent more than 5 years in Naples (Italy) as a lecturer for the German Academic Exchange Service she took up a post in the Italian Department at Duisburg University where she was awarded a PhD in 1991 for her dissertation on Verb and Variety, a study of Italian newspaper language for which she had created a marked-up corpus. In 1997 she concluded her ‘Habilitation’ (post-doctoral monograph) on Repeated Discourse and idiomatic competence based on her corpus of French, Italian and Spanish newspapers. Temporary professorships of Romance linguistics brought her to the universities of Cologne, Siegen, Bremen and Marburg. In 2005 she was offered the Chair of French, Francophone and Italian linguistics at Leipzig University, which she held until her retirement in 2019.Her research, teaching and main publications, embedded over the years more and more in a Digital Humanities perspective, focus on the history of the description and conceptualisation of Romance languages, corpus linguistics & and linguistics of parole (corpus-design, -theory, -markup and -analysis included), the construction of gender in language science, in grammars and language usage, as well as multilinguality in digital, urban, scientific and scholarly spaces. She participated in the project proposal EUROSYNCH (1992-1993), represented her university in the Thematic Network ACOHUM (1998-2000), proposed the project “Humanities and Information Technologies (HUM*IT)” in the framework of the European Year of Languages 2001, organised SILFI 2000 and CLiP 2001 and was a prominent member of the Network of Excellence “Computing & Humanities in Multilingual Europe” (CHiME) (2001-2003). In 2001 the Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford University offered her a Distinguished Visiting Scholarship and in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2010 the European Commission appointed her as an independent expert to the evaluation sessions for proposals received in response to the calls FP6-2003-Infrastructures-4, FP6-2004-Infrastructures-5, FP7-2007-Infrastructures-1, FP7-2008-Infrastructures-1, and FP7-2010-Infrastructures-1. Apart from serving and having served on various national and European scientific consulting and evaluation bodies (DARIAH-DE, CLARIA-DE, CAHIER, MSH Dijon, Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften (ZfdG) etc.) she constructed a fruitful collaboration with CLARIN-D, with PARTHENOS, CLARIN-EU and DARIAH-EU in the framework of the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture & Technology (https://esu.culintec.de/), which she founded and directed from 2009 until 2022 at the University of Leipzig. Her interest in and active involvement with scholarly associations led her to accept various prominent positions over the years. From 1996 to 2002 she was, in fact, member of the Exec of the Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana (SILFI) and from 1998 to 2000 President of the same association. From 1997 to 1999 she held the position of 2nd vice-president of the Deutscher Romanistenverband (DRV) and from 2000 to 2014 she was member of the Scientific Board of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik (GAL), directed its section Computerlinguistik from 2000 to 2002 and its section Soziolinguistik from 2002 to 2014 and hosted its 40th Conference GAL 2010 “SprachRäume” 2010 in Leipzig. Apart from this she was member of the international scientific committee of the seminars Computer - Literature - Philology (CLiP) from 2000 to 2008 and founding member and member of the Exec of the Circolo dei dialettologi di Sappada from 2002-2005. The strongest impact on her scholarly life had, however, the Association for Literary and Computing (ALLC) which she joined in 1989 because of the “loneliness” she felt as a corpus linguist. She served this association, in fact, first as co-opted member (1998-2001) and then as voting member (2001-2010) and was member of the joint workgroup ADHOC, established by ACH and ALLC in July 2002, which paved the way for the foundation of ADHO in 2005. She was appointed Chair of the then newly founded Standing Committee on Multi-Lingualism & Multi-Culturalism of ADHO in 2005, and directed it until 2014. From 2006 to 2012, she was a voting member on ADHO’s Steering Committee, and in 2015 she was elected to serve as voting member on the Exec of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) and became its representative in EASSH. Her membership of the Exec ended in 2016 when she became President of EADH, a position she held until 2023. During this time she was also President (elect) of the Constituent Organisations Board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO) from 2019 to 2021 and chaired the scientific programme committee of the EADH2020-2021 conference in Krasnoyarsk. Last but not least she was not only member of innumerable scientific programme committees of Digital Humanities and Language Resources conferences but has also considerable experience with the running of one of the Associate Organisations of EADH, the DHd (Digital Humanities in German speaking regions). In 2012 she was, in fact, elected member of the Steering Committee of this then newly founded association and held this position until 2022. In 2016 she hosted its 3rd international congress DHd 2016 “Modellierung - Vernetzung - Visualisierung: Die Digital Humanities als fächerübergreifendes Forschungsparadigma” with its 470 participants in Leipzig and was Chair of its scientific programme committee for the DHd conference in Bern (2017). She is very interested in the work, thinking and way of doing also of the Associate Organisations of EADH in Italy, in the Czech Republic, the Nordic Countries, and Russia, with whom she had the chance to work together in different settings and not least in the EADH AOs Forum.
Juan Pablo Chaclan
(Université Marie et Louis Pasteur, France)
Lecture: RayuelaParis: A Literary Journey Through Paris in Hopscotch with Python
Juan-Pablo Chaclan is a software engineer, IT consultant, and educator passionate about bridging technology and the humanities. Alongside his work with major French banks and international organizations, including the United Nations, he teaches Python and Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities at Université Marie et Louis Pasteur. He is the creator of RayuelaParis, a project that combines computational text analysis, geospatial technologies, and fieldwork to map and document the Paris of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch. He believes that code is not only a technical skill, but also a way of reading the world through new perspectives.
Katarzyna Foremniak
(Roche, Poland)
Lecture: Voices as Data: Computational Phonetics
Katarzyna Foremniak, PhD, is a computational linguist and phonetician with over fifteen years of experience as a researcher and academic teacher at the Department of Italian Studies, University of Warsaw. Her work bridges linguistics, phonetics, and natural language processing, with a particular focus on speech technologies and language data in cultural and applied contexts. She currently works as Content Designer and AI Readiness Specialist at Roche (Poland), where she supports the responsible integration of AI systems in business environments. She previously gained industry experience in the automotive sector, developing, implementing, and maintaining automatic speech recognition models and NLU systems. She has experience in designing and refining prompts for different large language models. She is the author of the five-volume grammar series Włoski w tłumaczeniach (“Italian in Translation,” A1–C1), later adapted for the German and Swiss markets as Satz für Satz. Italienisch, as well as over twenty scientific publications. She has extensive experience teaching linguistics and digital methods to interdisciplinary audiences.
Anna Kryvenko
(Institute of Contemporary History, Slovenia)
Lecture: ParlaMint
Anna Kryvenko is Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Group, Institute of Contemporary History (Ljubljana, Slovenia). She holds a PhD in linguistics and has over 15 years of experience teaching corpus analysis, discourse studies and lexical semantics at the university level. Her research interests include comparative modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies with a focus on metadata-enriched transcripts applied to parliamentary discourse in times of crisis, wartime oral history, national identity and group belonging in the context of Europeanisation, master narratives, competing frames and multimodal metaphor in political discourse. Currently she is a researcher for the projects OSCARS Open Science cascading grant project Comparing agenda settings across parliaments via the ParlaMint dataset (ParlaCAP) (Horizon Europe) and Parliament in the Age of Europeanisation: the Czech Republic and Slovenia (ParlAgE) (ARIS, J6-60112) as well as the programme Digital Humanities: resources, tools and methods (ARIS, P6-0436).
She is a contributing partner for the ParlaMint-UA dataset under the ParlaMint project, a co-author of the digital textbook From the dispatch box: unlocking the potential of ParlaMint through noSketch Engine and TEITOK and an instructor for several workshops on corpus-assisted studies of parliamentary data delivered at the Digital Humanities Conference 2023, Digital Humanities Conference 2025, the Centre for Digital Humanities at Utrecht University in 2025 and the European Summer University in 2023.
Rosenn Nicolas
(University of Galway)
Lecture: Studying dynastic and professional networks: Strict and Reliable LLM Workflows with SQL
Rosenn is a PhD student on the REBPAF project, funded by a European Marie Curie fellowship. She is based at the University of Galway in Ireland, under the supervision of Dr Catherine Emerson. Her research focuses on the history of publishing in Lyon in the 16th century. She is particularly interested in the Gabiano-Laporte family and their network, from a digital humanities perspective.
Mariusz Sozański
(Polish Air Navigation Services Agency, Poland)
Lecture: Voices as Data: Computational Phonetics
Mariusz Sozański is a DevOps expert with a background in computational physics. He currently works as Lead DevOps Architect at the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency, where he designs and oversees scalable, containerized infrastructures for complex distributed systems. With over twenty years of professional experience, he specializes in DevOps practices, Kubernetes-based architectures, and reproducible, cloud-native environments. He has worked in multidisciplinary, geographically distributed teams across Europe and the United States, contributing as an IT consultant, architect, and technical trainer. His expertise includes designing resilient infrastructures, implementing CI/CD pipelines, and ensuring operational reliability and scalability in high-demand environments. He regularly collaborates with international stakeholders and clients in English, Italian, Russian, and Polish.
Chiara Zuanni
(University for Continuing Education Krems / Chair of EADH)
Lecture: From Data to Engagement: digital mediation of cultural heritage
Chiara Zuanni is a full professor of Digital Cultures and Digital Humanities at the University for Continuing Education Krems (since September 2025), Chair of the European Association for Digital Humanities (since April 2026), and an associate professor in digital humanities, museology-focused, at the University of Graz (since 2018), where she also completed an Habilitation in digital humanities, researching practices and uses surrounding museum data (2024). She has a PhD in museology from the University of Manchester (2016), and a BA in Classics and MA in Archaeology from the University of Bologna. Her research interests focus on the construction of knowledge in museums with digital methods, museum data practices, 3D and data-driven research methods in cultural heritage collections, and digital audience research.