Keynotes

Design is not what you think it is.

Peter Biľak

In this talk, Peter Biľak will examine the ways that current publishing practices are rooted in the 19th century, and how in order to move forward, we may have to go back to the roots and reconnect with readers. He will also talk about his recent project, Works That Work magazine, which set out to rethink publishing paradigms, starting with its financing, distribution and production. Works That Work aims to discuss design outside of the traditional design discourse, and Biľak will argue for widening the understanding of the design discipline.

Biography
Peter Biľak was born in Czechoslovakia and lives in the Netherlands. He works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design, teaches at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Started Typotheque in 1999, Dot Dot Dot magazine in 2000, Indian Type Foundry in 2009, and Works That Work magazine in 2012.

Research Infrastructures, or how Document Engineering, Cultural Heritage, and Digital Humanities can go together.

Günter Mühlberger

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are one of the key concepts in Horizon 2020, the European Commission’s Research programme. 2,7 billion EUR are available for projects under the RI programme. The talk will describe some of the main characteristics of RIs and introduce the H2020 Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ) project which is dedicated to setting up a highly specialized service platform and making available some of the state-of-the-art technology in pattern recognition and document engineering, namely Handwritten Text Recognition, Automatic Writer Identification, and Keyword Spotting. Archives and libraries, as well as humanities scholars and the general public will be enabled to use the service platform which will improve access to cultural heritage, advance research in humanities and encourage a broad audience to investigate their personal family history.

Biography
Günter Mühlberger received his Ph.D. in 1996 with a dissertation on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since 1992 he worked as research assistant and lecturer at the Department for German Language and Literature. Since 1995 his professional focus is on Digital Humanities, Digital Libraries and digitisation technologies. From 1998 he initiated and managed several national and international projects (LAURIN, Books2u!, reUSE, METADATA ENGINE,…). From 2008 – 2012 he was member of the executive board of the FP7 project IMPACT and sub-project leader for “Text Recognition”. He is member of the Executive Board of the Europeana Newspaper project as well as advisor for the Austrian Ministry of Infrastructure and Science (“Kulturpool”) and member of the “Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities”.