About the programme

Ksenija Bogetić holds a PhD in Linguistics (University of Belgrade, 2018) and MA in English (University of Oxford, 2013), and works at the intersections of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, culture studies and cognitive linguistics. In the past, she taught for six years at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and held Visiting Scholar positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Univeristy of Lancaster, UK. From October 2022, she has been a Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie WIDERA Fellow in Ljubljana, leading a corpus-based project on crisis discourses in the post-Yugoslav area.

Ciril Bohak is an assistant professor of computer science and informatics at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana, who deals with data visualization from various domains, including the humanities. Among other things, he researches new approaches to using existing visualization techniques to display time-space-dependent data in the form of static and interactive visualizations for the purposes of outreach and discovery of new information in data.

In addition to visualization, Ciril also conducts research in the fields of computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and multimedia information retrieval. He is one of the founding members of the Slovenian HCI community and a multiple co-organizer of the Slovenian HCI SI conference. He is also one of the founding members of Slovenian Game Development Society. As part of a several-month exchange, he worked at Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea, where he participated in the development of detection and segmentation algorithms on point clouds. He spent three years as a researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, where he worked on segmentation and visualization of electron microscopy data.

Ciril is involved in the development of several visualization frameworks (such as RenderCore and VPT) aimed at machine-accelerated interactive three-dimensional visualization of data from various domains. RenderCore is also used to visualize collision event data from CERN colliders.

Filip Dobranić is a philosopher and sociologist of culture currently a ScD candidate at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana. His doctoral research focuses on semantic segmentation of historical print media with a focus on multimodal models, primarily computer vision models utilising text embedding maps.

Beyond his studies he collects and curates corpora of digitised historical and contemporary digital-native sources. He regularly cooperates with other researchers analysing the aforementioned sources.

Darja Fišer has a background in corpus linguistics and language resource creation. Her main research interest is the study of language as an interface to the broader socio-cultural context using digital methods. Her recent research has focused on specialized (academic, social media), institutionalized (parliamentary) and historical (19th century) communication.

She has been Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, since 2019, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History since 2021, and is leading the national research programme for Digital Humanities in Slovenia.

She is also Executive Director of CLARIN ERIC and is serving as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the National Interdisciplinary Research E-Infrastructure for Bulgarian Language and Cultural Heritage Resources and Technologies, the Czech National Corpus research infrastructure of the Institute of the Czech National Corpus at Charles University and Humanities and Cultural Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud.

Vojko Gorjanc is a full professor at the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. His teaching and research interests encompass sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, which he approaches through a corpus-linguistic methodology. He coordinates the PhD programme in Digital Linguistics in the Humanities and Social Sciences PhD programme at the University of Ljubljana. His current research focuses on language and linguistic ideologies, particularly standard language ideology and culture, as well as the distribution of power in discourse, with a specific emphasis on interpreted discourse. He serves as the Slovenian national coordinator of EU infrastructure DARIAH.

Alenka Kavčič holds a PhD in computer science and is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana. She is a member of the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Multimedia.

In addition to her teaching activities, she is involved in several research projects in the fields of multimedia and Internet technologies, computer-assisted learning and teaching, and digital humanities.

Her research has largely focused on the use of information technologies in education and computer support for learning and teaching, in particular through web-based and hypermedia educational systems that allow personalisation (of display, content, modality, etc.) for individual users and their preferences. She is also involved in the development of an individual counselling programme for older adults through reverse mentoring to improve digital competencies.

More recently, her research has focused on the digital humanities, where she is working on the preparation and use of historical parliamentary corpora and the development of methods and tools for the digitisation of cultural heritage.

Anna Kryvenko holds a PhD in Comparative-Historical and Typological Linguistics, with a background in lexical typology and figurative language studies. Previously, she served as an Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Philosophy of Language at Kyiv National Linguistic University (Ukraine).

In recent years, she has focused on modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies, examining issues related to the discursive construction and representation of national and European identity in public and semi-private discourse, along with their implications for strategic communication. She is currently conducting her post-doctoral research project, The Changing Discursive Semantics of EU Representations: Identity, Populism, Propaganda, funded by the Slovenian Research Agency and hosted by the Institute of Contemporary History (Slovenia). The project proposal received the MSCA Seal of Excellence in 2022. Additionally, she co-compiled the first full-text corpus of Ukraine’s parliamentary proceedings, ParlaMint-UA, as part of the ParlaMint project financially supported by CLARIN ERIC.

Jakob Lenardič is a linguist who works in the tradition of generative syntax and formal semantics. He focuses primarily on (post-)minimalist approaches to feature-agreement, structural case assignment, and argument structure in Slavic languages and explores the question if and how recursive syntactic derivation is related to a compositional semantics.

Aside from theoretical linguistics, his work also deals with corpus linguistics within the wider context of digital humanities, where he explores the contextually driven (i.e., pragmatic) interpretation of lexical phenomena, such as modality, and how this varies according to register (primarily in parliamentary discourse, computer-mediated communication, academic writing).

He also leads the CLARIN Resource Families initiative, whose aim is to offer international researchers from Digital Humanities, Social Sciences, and Human Language Technologies aggregated, user-friendly overviews of the tools and resources available through the CLARIN infrastructure.

Nikola Ljubešić is a senior researcher at the Department of Knowledge Technologies at the Jožef Stefan Institute, the Laboratory for Cognitive Modeling at the Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Ljubljana, and the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana. His work focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, and computational social science, with a particular emphasis on the South Slavic linguistic and cultural space.

His recent contributions include the development of the CLASSLA web corpora, the CLASSLA-Stanza linguistic processing pipeline, the ParlaSpeech open spoken corpora collection, as well as a range of additional datasets and models available through the CLASSLA HuggingFace organization. The collection of datasets and their subsequent automatic enrichment through models aims to support research in the social sciences and the humanities.

Matija Marolt is a full professor at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana. He is the head of the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Multimedia and Chair for Multimedia at the faculty. His research interests include audio and music information retrieval, multimedia collection analysis and visualisation, and 3D volumetric data visualisation. He has led numerous research projects and is the author of over 100 scientific publications.

Andrej Pančur holds a PhD in history and specializes in the field of digital humanities. He is the head of the infrastructure programme Research Infrastructure for Slovenian Historiography and the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. His research focuses on the economic and social history of the Slovene territory within the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th century, with a particular emphasis on monetary history. He also explores the history of interethnic relations and, more recently, has been intensively researching the history of the Jewish population in the territory of present-day Slovenia, from their settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries through to the end of the Second World War.

Kristina Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič holds a PhD in linguistics and uses approaches from discourse analysis, pragmatics and corpus linguistics to explore the descriptive and constitutive power of language. She is particularly interested in methodological and discourse analytical approaches to figurative language use. She also enjoys collaborative work on interdisciplinary projects, such as the ARENAS project which looks at the circulation of extremist narratives in politics and media.

In addition, her activities include developing training materials to promote corpus linguistics research methods in the Social Sciences and Humanities. She puts her enthusiasm for digital humanities into action also by participating in two CLARIN Initiatives – Resource Families and Tour de CLARIN – which are aimed at enhancing the visibility of digital language resources and tools, encouraging their reuse, and fostering collaboration among researchers in digital humanities.

Matevž Pesek is an assistant professor and researcher at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, where he completed his Bachelor’s (2012) and PhD (2018) degrees. Since 2009, he has been a member of the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Multimedia. His research focuses on music information retrieval, particularly in the context of e-learning, the use of virtual and augmented reality, and recommendation systems. Besides music, he has contributed to the development of the transcription system Govori.si, which is widely used by Slovenian researchers.

Additionally, he is involved in developing complex information systems based on open data (such as avtolog.si and tocen.si) and leads several research projects in this area. His professional expertise extends to public and private sectors in mobility, transportation, insurance, and broader information systems optimization.

Damjan Popič is an associate professor at the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he teaches courses related to the linguistic system of the Slovenian language and the development of modern technologies, especially those related to the use and analysis of natural language.

Ajda Pretnar Žagar is a computational anthropologist who works with computational methods for the social sciences and humanities. She primarily researches how machine learning and data analytics approaches can be used to understand human habits and practices. Her work focuses on the anthropology of labor, value studies, and studies of algorithmic systems. A large part of her research relies on text mining and discovering patterns in linguistic data.

In addition to her research, Ajda is also dedicated to teaching machine learning methods. She spent some time as an assistant at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and currently teaches the Text Mining course at the University of Pavia as part of the xAIM master’s program. She has conducted over 50 workshops for researchers, professionals, and the general public. Within the PUMICE project, she designed lessons with a touch of artificial intelligence for elementary and high school students. In the 2024-25 academic year, she co-teaches the Text Mining course with Kristina Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič as part of the Digital Historiography microcredential program.

Ajda is also a member of the development team for the data analytics program Orange Data Mining at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science.

Jure Skubic is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He works at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana where he holds the position of a research assistant. In addition, he holds a position of an Assistant for Sociology of Culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.

In his research, he mostly focuses on analyzing intersectional perspectives on gender, politics and media. He is mainly interested in violence against women in politics in media (with special attention to social media), analyzing unequal political representation of men and women as well the question of power distribution inside parliaments, unequal positions of men and women within political institutions and social structures and gender-based violence on all levels of politics. Lately, he is also focusing on researching the phenomena of “gender ideology” and the emergence of “anti-gender movements” as well as their influence on parliamentary discourse. He also works with and helps with the annotation of parliamentary corpora and tries to find ways to familiarize social sciences with the potential that parliamentary corpora present for their research.

Jure Skubic is a member of Slovenian Sociological Association and a board member of “Women’s and Gender Studies” research network active within the European Sociological Association (ESA). In addition, he is a member of the “Gender and Politics in South-East Europe” (GenPolSEE) research network, which operates within Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory and Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade.

Uroš Šmajdek is a young researcher in the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Multimedia at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana. As a doctoral student, his research focuses on extracting information from historical texts and its spatiotemporal vizualization, with a particular emphasis on Slovenian parliamentary corpora from the 20th century.

In addition to his primary research, Uroš develops and implements methods for visualizing volumetric data and molecular structures, the latter in collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where he also completed a four-month internship during his master’s studies.