We are very happy to welcome Jan Kostkan to our team as a PhD student, officially joining us on July 1st. Although Jan is no stranger to CHC, having worked with us for several years as a junior developer and a full-time developer, we are excited to have him take on this new role.

Jan’s research will be centered around the Golden Imprints research project. In his own words, he expresses his interest in representation learning from images and text, as well as change detection methods. His project aims to bridge the gap between these methods and the realm of historical scholarship, creating a robust high performance computing infrastructure for historians who work with texts, images, and demographic data originating in Scandinavia between 1750 and 1930. This infrastructure will be an invaluable resource, facilitating collaborative analysis of language and image patterns, trend recognition, and deeper insights into historical subtleties, particularly during the period commonly referred to as the Danish Golden Age.

Jan holds a degree in Cognitive Science, and alongside his academic pursuits, he has dedicated a substantial portion of his career to assisting researchers with complex data challenges. During occaisional pauses from his studies, he occupied a full-time developer role at CHC, contributed his expertise to the data team of a political party, pursued studies at the Czech Technical University, and embarked on a research visit to our collaborators at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden.

We are thrilled to have Jan as part of our team, and we look forward to the contributions he will make to the Golden Imprints project. Welcome, Jan, to your new role as a PhD student at CHC