PD Dr. Christian Reul

Qualifications and Career

• Since 12/2024: Head of the Research Unit for Digital Applications in Humanities Studies (University of Würzburg)
• 07/2024: Postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) and Venia Legendi (09/24) in the subject Applied Computer Science (University of Würzburg)
• 09/2023: Offering of Academy Professorship (W2) for “Research Software Engineering in the Digital Humanities” (Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz / University of Marburg) – declined
• 10/2018-12/2024: Head of the Digitization Unit of the Centre for Philology and Digitality (University of Würzburg)
• 10/2015-08/2020: Doctoral studies at the Chair for Artificial Intelligence and Applied Computer Science (University of Würzburg). Dr. rer. nat. obtained in 08/2020. Doctoral thesis: An Intelligent Semi-Automatic Workflow for Optical Character Recognition of Historical Printings
• 10/2015-10/2018: Research assistant at the Chair for Artificial Intelligence and Applied Computer Science (University of Würzburg)
• 2009-2015: Studies of Computer Science at the University of Würzburg. M.Sc. (specialized in Intelligent Systems) obtained in 10/2015.

Major Research Grants (as applicant)

• Reference project "Digital fairy tale reference library by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm" (DFG, 2024-27)
• Digitisation and indexing of historical textbooks on religious education and development of a knowledge base for educational history research (DFG, 2024-27)
• Robust and performant methods for layout analysis in OCR-D (DFG, 2023-25)
• OCR4all-libraries – Full-text transformation of historical collections (DFG, 2021-24)

Selected Projects (participation as co-investigator and/or technical partner)

• Rückerts Liebesfrühling digital (DFG, 2026-29)
• Reassessing the Textual Tradition of the Book of Judith (DFG, 2026-29)
• Digital Pathways to the Hittite World (VW, 2025-27)
• Musico Pratico - Pietro Pontio's dialogues in translation, digital evaluation and critical reception (DFG/SNF, 2025-28)
• Tive: Studies in the Hurrian Language and Texts (DFG, 2025-37)
• Würzburg: Housebook without houses (DFG, 2025-28)
• The photo poem in illustrated magazines between 1895 and 1945 (DFG, 2024-27)
• Musical Instruments in Ancient Mesopotamia (MIAM): Terminology, Iconography, and Contexts (DFG, 2024-27)
• William Lovell digital (DFG, 2024-27)
• From English in Hong Kong to Hong Kong English: A new diachronic approach to genre and varietal developments in (post)colonial contexts (DFG, 2024-27)
• Arthurian literature from the library of the Duc de Nemours (DFG, 2023-26)
• The Seven Sages of Rome: editing and reappraising a forgotten premodern classic from global and gendered perspectives (DFG/AHRC, 2023-26)
• Narragonia Latina. Bilingual hybrid edition of the Latin ‚Ships of Fools' by Jakob Locher (1497) and Jodocus Badius (1505) (DFG, 2022-25)
• Measuring the World by Degrees. Intensity in early modern medicine and natural philosophy (1400-1650) (DFG, 2022-25)
• Camerarius digital (DFG, 2021-24)
• Annotated Corpus of Ancient West Asian Imagery: Cylinder Seals (ACAWAI-CS) (BMBF, 2021-23)
• Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum digitalis (TLHdig) (DFG, 2020-23)
• Kallimachos – Centre for Digital Edition and Quantitative Analysis (BMBF, 2014-19, member of the Narragonien digital project group)
• Richard Wagner Writings. Historical-critical complete edition (Academy Program, 2013--29)

Honors and Awards

• Best Paper Award at the 6th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HiP) for the paper Mixed Model OCR Training on Historical Latin Script for Out-of-the-Box Recognition and Finetuning
• Shortlist for Best Paper Award at the 3rd International Conference on Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage (DATeCH) for the paper Automatic Semantic Text Tagging on Historical Lexica by Combining OCR and Typography Classification
• Award from the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Würzburg for Exceptional Academic Achievements and an Outstanding Master's Thesis

Academic Activities

• Member of IAPR, DAGM, EADH, DHd
• DHd Working Group OCR (Founding Chairman, Convenor 2019-23)
• Joint Organizer of the Working Group "Philology and Digitality" at the University of Würzburg
• Reviewer of research grants for several funding organziations in Germany and Austria
• Reviewer for various journals and conferences in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition, and Digital Humanities; among others IJDAR, DHQ, JOCCH, JDMDH, JLCL, ICPR, VISAPP, DATeCH, HiP, QURATOR, EADH, CHR, and LREC

A (somewhat) complete list of publications I co-authored can be found here.