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Martin Roček

Martin Roček

Senior developer at Charles University, doing 🪄 in JS/TS, PHP and a bit of Python. Freelance designer on the side.

Freelance programmer and designer at Self-employed

Open to:Collaborations
Preferred workplace:Remote (worldwide)
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Freelance Developer & Designer with a background in Digital Humanities. I hold a PhD from Charles University in Prague, where I researched the textual transmission of medieval Latin manuscripts — and along the way, I started building the digital tools that scholars like me actually needed.

That's led to projects like Manu, a collaborative annotation platform for manuscript research, and humanities.tools, a curated catalogue for the Digital Humanities community. I design and build these end to end — visual identity, interface, and code — because how something looks matters just as much as how it works.

My freelance work is in React, Vue, and Laravel, but I spend as much time in Figma as in a code editor. I take on projects for clients who want something that feels considered — where the logo and the component library are part of the same conversation.

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Career: 6

Freelance programmer and designer

Self-employed

Remote

Mar 2014 - Present

Freelance design and frontend development, working with founders and small teams who need both handled by one person. Visual identity work — logos, brand systems, type and colour decisions — through to high-fidelity interfaces built in React (sometimes Vue, with Laravel on the backend when the project calls for it). Most engagements run end to end: starting with the brand or the blank page, ending with a site or product that's actually shipped. The design leads, the code follows — but I'm the one doing both, so nothing gets lost in translation between the two. Small, considered work for people who notice the details. Or, put another way: I'm the designer who writes React, and the developer who spends too long picking the right weight of a typeface.

Full Stack Engineer

Faculty of Arts, Charles University

Oct 2022 - Present

Senior developer on the tech team, working across the faculty on tools for humanities research. Most of the work falls into three overlapping areas: Building internal web applications end to end — design, frontend, backend — in Next.js, Express, and Laravel. These are the tools departments actually use day to day: workflow systems, data management, the unglamorous infrastructure that makes research admin less painful. Sitting between the technology and the researchers. A lot of my job is translation: helping humanities projects figure out what they actually need technically, sketching architectures, and making sure the computational side stays approachable for people whose background isn’t in code. Full-stack engineering on top of that — frontend interfaces and backend APIs built around the shape of academic data, which rarely looks like anything a standard CRUD app expects.

Scholarship Holder

Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Jan 2023 - Dec 2023

Worked on various digital humanities applications and approaches.

Principal Investigator

Charles University

May 2021 - Apr 2023

Principal Investigator of the project 'Dreams, Money and Christ: Popular Texts and Their Transmission in the Late Middle Ages", the aim was to develop a prototype application that would allow semantic comparison of medieval Latin texts using machine learning.

PythonMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceNext.js

Graphic Artist (volunteer)

Isleward

May 2016 - Jan 2018

Isleward is a moddable, multiplayer roguelike game that runs in a browser. I contribute to the project's code and work closely with the author on server infrastructure and deployment.

ProcreateAdobe Photoshop

Archivist

Vojenský ústřední archiv

Aug 2013 - Feb 2016

Education: 4

Charles University

Doctor of Philosophy, Medieval and Neo-Latin Studies

Jan 2019 - Jan 2025

Thesis: Unraveling the Contaminated Tradition: Medieval Dreambooks in Bohemical Manuscripts

Charles University

Master's degree, General History

Jan 2016 - Jan 2019

Thesis: Monsters in Medieval Imagination of British Isles

Aberystwyth University

Erasmus

2018

Charles University

Bachelor's degree, History

Jan 2012 - Jan 2016

Thesis: Dispute over Catholic and Protestant notions of purgatory in the 16th century

Projects: 8

Translucens

translucens.humanities.tools

Jan 2026 - Present

A browser-based application designed to restore legibility to digitized medieval manuscripts by removing ink bleed-through. By aligning and processing recto/verso scans, the tool provides humanists and researchers with a streamlined way to enhance historical documents without requiring specialized technical expertise. Stack: React.js, Vite, Python

MANU

manu.is

Jun 2024 - Present

A collaborative workspace for digital humanities research. Manu enables scholars to import IIIF-based manuscripts, apply precision annotations, and generate AI transcriptions via Google Gemini. The platform prioritizes open standards (W3C) and data portability, providing a robust infrastructure for both individual and institutional research projects. Stack: Next.js, WebSockets, Node.js, MongoDB

Hodnocení akademických a vědeckých pracovníků

Apr 2022 - Present

An application for evaluation of academic staff. Tech: Express.js, Next.js, MongoDB, websockets

Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online

bosworthtoller.com

Sep 2017 - Present

An online version of the Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Stack: Laravel, Nuxt.js, MySQL

SilentBox

github.com/silencesys/silentbox

Sep 2017 - Present

A lightbox inspired Vue.js component.

Evaluace

evaluace.ff.cuni.cz/results

Jul 2016 - Present

An app for student’s evaluation of lectures and teachers at Charles University. Stack: Laravel, MySQL, Vue

Lipnice Bible

lipnicebible.ff.cuni.cz

Jan 2021 - May 2021

Web application presenting the manuscript of the Lipnice Bible. Stack: Express.js, MongoDB, Nuxt.js

Vocabula.lat

vocabula.lat

Vocabula.lat is not exactly a dictionary, but rather a tool that aggregates data from several other dictionaries. It was developed as a tool to help me translate my latin texts and provide me with grammatical information about each word. Stack: React.js, Express.js

Credentials: 1

Publications: 5

Thoughts at the Margin1 article
Mar 2026

Other publications

Bosworth-Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online

Structuring Lexical Data and Digitising Dictionaries

Book Chapter
doi.org/10.1163/9789004702660_009

Tichý, Ondřej, Roček, Martin

2024

Beyond the Canon: Exploring Overlooked Medieval Texts

Publication

Doležalová, Lucie, Fúsik, Ondřej, Kozák, Jakub, Pacovský, Karel, Roček, Martin

2024

Výklad snů

Opuscula.Neznámá dílka z rukopisů Kříže z Telče

Book Chapter

Roček, Martin, Doležalová, Lucie, Králová, Magda

2022

Opuscula - korpus latinských textů z rukopisů Kříže z Telče

Publication

Doležalová, Lucie, Bendová, Berenika, Dragoun, Michal, Fúsik, Ondřej, Hlaváčková, Veronika, Kozák, Jakub, Pacovský, Karel, Roček, Martin, Tříska, Pavel

2022

Languages: 2

Czech(Native or bilingual)
English(Full professional)

Skills: 31

Technical

Artificial IntelligenceExpress.jsFigmaFull-Stack DevelopmentGitJavaScriptLaravelMachine Learning
MongoDBNext.jsNode.jsNuxt.jsPHPPythonReact.jsSQLTypeScriptVue.jsWeb DevelopmentWordPress

Creative

Adobe PhotoshopDesignDigital IllustrationLogo DesignPrototypingUI DesignUX DesignWeb Design

Other

HistoryMedieval HistoryProcreate