#DigitalHistory #STS #NLP #SNA #OpenScience #HistoryOfComputing #CriticalAIStudies #FAIR #CARE
👨🏻‍💻 moritzmaehr.ch 🙇🏻‍♂️ bsky mastodon 🧜🏻‍♂️ he/him

Dr. sc. ETH Zurich Moritz Mähr is an associate researcher in digital humanities at the University of Bern and an information and library science specialist with Research Analytics Services at ETH Zurich. From August 2026, he will additionally serve as Senior Scientist (Digital History) at the University of Bern. He is also a visiting research fellow at the University of Potsdam in May and June 2026, a lecturer in history at UniDistance.ch, 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. His research bridges digital history, science and technology studies, and open research infrastructure.

His current agenda spans five areas:

1. 🧠 Digital Source Criticism in the Age of AI – reproducible methods for identifying bias in data, algorithms, and interfaces.
2. 🌐 Critical AI Studies in Digital Humanities & Digital History – critical AI literacy, audit studies, dataset ethnography, and bias-aware metadata workflows.
3. 🗃️ Histories of Digitisation – the history of digitization in public administration, especially the Swiss migration regime.
4. 🏛️ Public History Infrastructure – low-barrier, open-source platforms like Stadt.Geschichte.Basel for FAIR/CARE storytelling and data reuse.
5. 🌱 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.

• Decoding Inequality: Critical Perspectives on Machine Learning
• Critical AI Literacy for Historians
• Prompting Methods for Historians with ChatGPT
• Corpus-as-Network: NLP + Graphs in Historical Research

Full teaching history is on my website.

Active member of:

• OpenData.ch
• Digital History Network Switzerland
• Digital Society Initiative, University of Zurich
• Netzwerk Digitale Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Potsdam

All affiliations

• ✉️ moritz.maehr@faculty.unibe.ch
• 🌐 moritzmaehr.ch
• 💻 @maehr

Keep building, keep questioning, and never stop examining how our digital tools shape what we know—and forget—about the past.