Dr. sc. ETH Zurich Moritz Mähr is a Research Associate in Digital History at the Department of History, University of Bern, and an Associate Researcher in Digital Humanities. He is also an Information and Library Science Specialist with Research Analytics Services at ETH Zurich. Until 2025, he served as Project Manager of Stadt.Geschichte.Basel at the University of Basel and was 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.

His research bridges digital history, science and technology studies, and open research infrastructure. His focus areas include digital source criticism in the age of AI, the history of digitization in public administration, minimal-computing approaches to public history, and digital sustainability grounded in FAIR/CARE principles.

Dr. Mähr studied history, 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 research operationalizes Open Science principles in digital history through reproducible methods, interoperable infrastructures, and participatory governance.

Research Project

Critical AI Studies in Digital Humanities and Digital History

This project analyzes how generative models and MLLMs reshape scholarly practice, source criticism, and publication cultures. It integrates STS, data ethics, and method development and delivers open, reproducible workflows for bias-aware metadata and sustainable infrastructures aligned with FAIR/CARE.

Research Interests

  • Critical AI studies, algorithmic governmentality, data politics
  • Digital source criticism and methodological critique in history
  • Ethics, FAIR/CARE, reproducibility, digital sustainability, minimal computing
  • Digital collections and bias-aware metadata practices
  • Natural language processing and information extraction for historical corpora
  • Social network analysis and graph data in DH
  • History of digitization in public administration; history of computing

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