#HistoryOfComputing #DigitalHistory #STS #CriticalAIStudies #OpenScience #NLP #SNA #FAIR #CARE
👨🏻💻 moritzmaehr.ch 🙇🏻♂️
bsky
mastodon 🧜🏻♂️ he/him
Dr. sc. ETH Zurich Moritz Mähr is a historian of technology. He studies how computers change institutions and everyday life, especially in Swiss public administration and migration governance.
He is a Research Associate in Digital History at the Department of History and an Associate Researcher in Digital Humanities at the University of Bern. He is also a Lecturer in History at UniDistance.ch, an External Lecturer in Data Design + Art at HSLU, and a Technical Advisor for the University of Zurich research project Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church in Switzerland. Until 2025, he was the Project Manager of Stadt.Geschichte.Basel at the University of Basel and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg. In May and June 2026, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Potsdam, and until 2026 an Information and Library Science Specialist with Research Analytics Services at ETH Zurich.
He studies the history of computing as a history of institutions, knowledge, and power. In digital history, he examines how digitisation, metadata, and AI shape the sources available to researchers. His current agenda spans five areas:
- 🧠 Digital Source Criticism in the Age of AI – reproducible methods for identifying bias in data, algorithms, and interfaces.
- 🌐 Critical AI Studies in Digital Humanities & Digital History – critical AI literacy, audit studies, dataset ethnography, and bias-aware metadata workflows.
- 🗃️ Histories of Digitisation – the history of digitization in public administration, especially the Swiss migration regime.
- 🏛️ Public History Infrastructure – low-barrier, open-source platforms like Stadt.Geschichte.Basel for FAIR/CARE storytelling and data reuse.
- 🌱 Digital Sustainability – minimal computing, reproducibility, inclusivity, and ethical longevity in scholarly workflows.
Moritz studied history, philosophy of knowledge, computer science, and banking and finance in Zurich and Berlin. He received his doctorate from ETH Zurich for his dissertation on the digitization of Swiss migration authorities in the 1960s. His work operationalizes Open Science principles in digital history through reproducible methods, interoperable infrastructures, and participatory governance.
I’m always looking for thoughtful collaborators in digital history, STS, research infrastructure, and critical AI studies. If you’re building collections, writing code, or rethinking scholarly workflows—let’s connect.
You’re welcome to fork, open issues, or submit pull requests on any pinned repositories. Contributions, ideas, and provocations are all welcome.
- All Data Are Local: Introduction to Data Literacy – HSLU, Data Design + Art
- Critical AI Literacy for Historians – UniDistance.ch, MA in Historical Sciences
- Stochastic Parrots and Beyond: Normative Dimensions of Generative AI – University of Basel, GRACE, with Laura Wagner
- Decoding Inequality: Critical Perspectives on Machine Learning – University of Bern, with Rachel Huber
- GitHub as a Project Management Tool – University of Bern
- The Corpus as a Network: NLP + Graphs in Historical Research – University of Bern
All courses and resources are on my website.
- Simple Topic Modeling – find the themes in a document collection, entirely in your browser.
- Awesome Digital History – find primary sources online and learn how to research history digitally.
- Open Research Data Template – start a clear, citable, and reusable research data repository.
More software and resources are on my website.
Advisory and leadership roles:
- Co-opted member of the Executive Board, Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (DHd), 2026–2028
- Member of the Open Science Commission, Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences
- Member of the Advisory Board, OpenData.ch
- Founding member, Digital History Network Switzerland
Member of:
- Digitale Gesellschaft
- Geschichte & Informatik Schweiz
- Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Geschichte (SGG)
- SSHOC-CH
- Digital Humanities Community, University of Zurich
- Netzwerk Digitale Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Potsdam
Keep building, keep questioning, and never stop examining how our digital tools shape what we know—and forget—about the past.