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Jörg Haentzschel
Sebastian Majstorovic, 30, doesn’t sleep much anymore. Together with 1200 programmers, archive specialists and nerds, he is in a race against time, more precisely: against the destruction of Ukrainian culture by Russian attacks. He would prefer to tackle it himself, physically, analogously. Hang paintings from museum walls and move them to secure basements, store archival materials and unique books in fireproof depots. But since that is not possible, the man from Cologne, who did his doctorate in Florence and is now in Vienna on Austrian Center for Digital Humanities works, found another way to help the Ukrainians. He and his comrades-in-arms sit at their computers all over the world and save everything that Ukrainian cultural institutions have put online from their collections. At least digital versions of works of art, manuscripts or photographs will be preserved. In just two weeks, they have already downloaded the complete data from 2,300 websites: 300 gigabytes of a collection of rare prints from Odessa University, rare folk music recordings, 3D scans from excavations, patterns of historical costumes, the Kiev Fortress Collection, the Treasury of the National Museum and the holdings of several Holocaust museums.