Julien A. Raemy

Data Scientist at the Swiss Federal Archives. Interoperability Specialist at DaSCH. Active member of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and Linked Art.

[First, a little bit about me]

My name is Julien Antoine Raemy (he/him) and I come from Fribourg, Switzerland. I am a bookseller by trade and I used to work for a book distributor and in a bookshop. After receiving my Certificate of Vocational Education and Training of Bookseller in August 2008 (or in French: Certificat fédéral de capacité de libraire), I decided to brush up on my English and I did a six-month internship in the ELT Marketing Department of Oxford University Press in the UK. I would have loved to stay a bit longer but I had to go back to Switzerland in order to fulfill the mandatory military service period, which I did in one go in ten months.

Then, I worked here and there before I decided that it was time to travel again in Australia (also, I still needed to improve my English skills). I went to Syndey and studied there for about seven months between September 2011 and April 2012. It was all great but I didn’t really know what to do. I thought it would be a good idea to become an English Teacher for some time in Poland so I undertook an intensive four-week course in July 2012 to obtain a Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA). Once more, it was a great experience to live and work in Warsaw for almost ten months. Nevertheless, I decided to go back to Switzerland to seek meaningfulness. But what shall I do?

[Then, the more interesting stuff about what I do now]

Between September 2013 and July 2017, I undertook on a part-time basis a Bachelor in Library and Information Science (LIS) at the HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de Genève (HEG-GE) in Geneva, Switzerland. Between January 2015 and the end of my bachelor’s degree, I was also working for the EPFL’s MetaMedia Center - now called the Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center - as a Photo Archivist for the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. I really enjoyed to work and study at the same time.

Between August 2017 and January 2021, I was working as a Research and Teaching Assistant at the HEG-GE for the Professor René Schneider and besides working on his research projects, I helped him to coordinate the bilingual curriculum in LIS (French/German). During that I also carried out a Master’s degree in Information Science on a part-time basis so that I can keep working alongside my studies.

Starting July 2020 and in parallel to my assistantship in Geneva, I started working as a Knowledge Graph Engineer and IIIF Systems Architect for the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI) hosted at the University of Zurich and operated in cooperation with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) and the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA). I was committed to working there for a longer period of time but finally I stayed there for six months until the end of 2020 as I received an opportunity to pursue a funded PhD at the University of Basel.

Since February 2021, I have embarked on a PhD in Digital Humanities at the University of Basel, Digital Humanities Lab in the context of the multidisciplinary project funded by the SNSF titled Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archive (PIA). Simultaneously, I have also started working as an Interoperability Specialist at DaSCH, the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities.

[What about this website?]

This website is about my work, views and expectations on Information Interoperability, Knowledge Representation, Linked Open Data (LOD), Digital Preservation, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and all sorts of things related to the Cultural Heritage field.