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Academic blogs

Author: Christoph Rass

Christoph Rass · NGHM@UOS

Watching a Register Move | An Animated Card Index and the Production of Migration

This essay follows an animated visualization built from Osnabrück’s historic foreigners’ registration index to ask, from the perspective of CRC 1604 ‘Produktion von Migration’, whether a bureaucratic register merely records migration — or helps produce it. On the screen (see animation below), the year 1943 burns in two colors. Blue…

Christoph Rass · NGHM@UOS

Notes from the DHIP-Summer University in Paris | Doing Migration History with Digital Methods.

This essay presents a shortened, reworked version of the keynote lecture given at the summer university ‘Doing Migration History with Digital Methods’, held at the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP / Institut historique allemand) and organized by Prof. Dr. Mareike König together with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital…

Christoph Rass · NGHM@UOS

Hidden Legacies, Untidy Endings. Notes from the InechO Conference in Florence.

What happens to an international organization after it has ceased to exist? On 23 and 24 April 2026, the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre at the European University Institute in Florence convened a conference of the InechO project (International Organizations and their European Consequences and Hidden Outcomes) on precisely this…

Christoph Rass · NGHM@UOS

Its all in the Cards. A revolution in information technology during the 1920s

Index cards and card-file indices have shaped data collection and management in modern societies throughout the 20th century. They turned into a key innovation during the 1920s; massive card-based data engines became omnipresent during the first half of the century and grew into integral parts of data management systems with…

Christoph Rass · NGHM@UOS

Crimmigration Cycles: Reflexive approaches to the production of the delinquent other and migration control*

von Christoph Rass A conference discussed Crimmigration at the ZIF/Bielefeld in February 2021. Research on the merger of criminal law and migration law continues to fuel current debates that are both new and old to historians specializing in migration and migration control (de Koster & Reinke 2017; García Hernández 2017;…