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Doing Migration History with Digital Methods. Summer University at the German Historical Institute Paris, 22–26 June 2026

=== Vers la version française du programme “Faire l’histoire des migrations avec des méthodes numériques

=== Zur deutschen Fassung des Programms “Migrationsgeschichte mit digitalen Methoden

Organised by: Mareike König (GHI Paris), Denis Scuto (C2DH, University of Luxembourg), Machteld Venken (C2DH, University of Luxembourg), Giovanni Vitali (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), Claire Zalc (CNRS/EHESS)

Place: German Historical Institute Paris / Institut historique allemand, 8, rue du Parc-Royal, 75003 Paris
Date: 22–26 June 2026

Event in English and French. Paper titles indicate the language of presentation.
On-site attendance is open to the public without registration (except workshops).
Both keynotes will be streamed via Zoom.

Information: dh@dhi-paris.fr

With the financial support of the C2DH, University of Luxembourg, and the GHI Paris.

How does migration history change when it is written with digital sources and methods? This question is at the heart of the 2026 summer university at the German Historical Institute Paris. As the field increasingly works with large, often multilingual corpora, the programme brings together contributions that explore a wide range of sources—from administrative records and correspondence to databases—and examine how these can be transformed and analysed as data. Approaches such as text analysis, spatial visualisation and network analysis open up new perspectives on mobility, trajectories and social relations.

At the same time, digital methods raise fundamental methodological and epistemological questions. Issues of data modelling and categorisation intersect with problems of bias, uneven coverage and the limits of digitised sources. The summer school therefore emphasises critical reflection, combining empirical case studies with discussions on source criticism, transparency and contextualisation.

The programme is framed by hands-on workshops on OCR/HTR, GIS and digital data processing, as well as keynote lectures by Lorella Viola and Christoph Rass.

Monday, June 22, 2026

5:30 pm Registration and Arrival

6:00 pm Welcome Address by Klaus Oschema (Director GHI Paris) and Introduction by the Organisers

Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner, by Edwin Levick, 1906, No known restrictions on publication, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97501073/

6:30 pm   Keynote Lecture

Chair: Mareike König (GHI Paris)

Lorella Viola (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Mapping Migrant Worlds: Digital Approaches to Narratives, Identity, and Belonging

Summary of the Keynote

In this keynote, Lorella Viola will offer an overview of digital migration studies by reflecting on how digital sources and methods reshape the questions, scales, and narratives of migration history. Drawing on her research on Italian migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, she will discuss how migrant narratives, identity formation, and the negotiation of belonging in host societies can be studied through digitally assembled historical corpora. At the centre of the presentation is ChroniclItaly, a corpus of Italian diasporic newspapers that she built to investigate how Italian migrants described themselves, their communities, and their political and social worlds. Using examples from this research, she will show how digital methods such as corpus building, text analysis, and the mapping of places and entities mentioned by migrants can illuminate questions of migration, remigration, identity conflict, and political affiliation. The keynote will highlight both the analytical potential of these approaches and the interpretive challenges they raise, offering a concise view of methods, projects, and results in a field that increasingly connects computational inquiry with the close reading of migrant experience.

Bio of Lorella Viola

Dr. Lorella Viola is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities & Society at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research examines how power, ideology, and cultural assumptions operate through language and digital infrastructures, shaping knowledge and cultural memory. She develops DH methodologies and theoretical frameworks to study the societal impact of digital transformation. Her recent books – The Humanities in the Digital (Springer) and Multilingual Digital Humanities (Routledge) – rethink the role of the humanities in digitally mediated worlds. Her work shows how digital systems actively shape whose voices become legible in the archive, and calls for decolonial, infrastructure-aware approaches to digital heritage.

Register for Online Participation: https://maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/webinar/register/WN_PtAvaCQQRH2Eo-_hny-yWQ

Dinner for Speakers and Registered Participants at the GHI Paris

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

9:30 am Hands-on Workshops (parallel sessions, registration via dh@dhi-paris.fr)

  1. Introduction to Handwritten Text Recognition with eScriptorium (Pauline Spychala, GHI Paris, and Hippolyte Souvay, University of Fribourg)
  2. From Scratch to Maps: Digital Mapping for the Humanities. An Introduction to QGIS (Giovanni Vitali, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)

1:00 pm Lunch for Speakers and Participants

2:30 pm  Plenary Session: Data Modelling, Critical Data Practices, and Ethical Reflections

Chair: Lorella Viola (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Noel Mariam George (London School of Economics): From Registration to Data Infrastructure: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Category Drift, and the Making of Migration Knowledge

Daniel Richter (C2DH, University of Luxembourg): Marriage Registers as Heuristic Sources for Migration History: Comparative Perspectives on Stability and Change Across Towns and Villages (1850–1923)

3:30 pm Coffee Break

4:00 pm  Plenary Session: Mapping Migration: GIS, Visualization, and Spatial Analysis I

Chair: Denis Scuto (C2DH, University of Luxembourg)

Blandine Landau (C2DH, University of Luxembourg) and Maël Le Noc (EHESS, Paris): Biographies, Testimonies, Visualization: Mapping Individual Migration Paths of the Jews of Luxembourg 1935–1947

Ekaterina Iakovleva (C2DH, University of Luxembourg): Beyond a Database: Wikibase as Research Infrastructure for Migration Prosopography

Free Evening

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

9:15 am  Plenary Session: Mapping Migration: GIS, Visualization, and Spatial Analysis II

Chair: Giovanni Vitali (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)

Catrina Langenegger (University of Basel): Refugee Care in Switzerland During World War II in the Light of Historical Statistics and GIS

Alex Relicovschi (C2DH, University of Luxembourg): Présentation d’une chaîne de traitement en histoire digitale des migrations: mise en cartes et mise en données. Dudelange (Luxembourg), XIXe–XXe siècles

10:35 am Coffee Break

11:00 am Plenary Session: Transforming Sources Into Data: OCR and HTR Methods and Their Challenges

Chair: Pauline Spychala (GHI Paris)

Christelle Al Haddad (C2DH, University of Luxembourg): Written Language in Correspondences and Parish Letters of Luxembourgish Missionaries (1795–1900)

Sandra Velebit (Johannes Kepler University Linz): Digitizing Migration Data into Data Frames Using OCR and R. Problems and Workarounds

Ling Zi (École normale supérieure/Beijing Normal University): OCR, Romanization, and the Searchability of Chinese Migrants in European Digital Archives (1900–1950)

1:00 pm Lunch for Speakers and Participants

2:00 pm   Hands-on Workshops (parallel sessions, registration via dh@dhi-paris.fr)

  1. Building LLM-Assisted Workflows for Entity and Geospatial Data Processing (Alex Relicovschi, Ekaterina Iakovleva, both at C2DH, University of Luxembourg)
  2. How to Process Interviews of Persons at Risk? Insights from the U-CORE project (Machteld Venken, Vladyslav Siulhin, both C2DH, University of Luxembourg)

Free Evening

Thursday, June 25, 2026

10:00 am  Plenary Session: Modelling and Analysing Migration through Textual Data

Chair: Joanna Wojdon (University of Wrocław)

Timur Mitrofanov (University of Heidelberg/Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe): Latvian Diaspora Press Published in English-Speaking Countries in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Federica Schiaffino (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): Mapping the “Imaginary East”: A Digital Analysis of West German Travel Reports (1967–1973)

11:00 am Coffee Break

11:30 am  Plenary Session: Datafication and Migration Databases

Chair: Claire Zalc (CNRS/EHESS)

Valentin Rhodius (Université de Caen Normandie): Traversées maritimes des déplacés et réfugiés (1946–1952): une analyse par base de données

Théo Behra (Université de Strasbourg): Germanosearch et le portail “Archives disséminées”: enjeux méthodologiques et épistémologiques pour l’étude des migrations allemandes aux XIXe et XXe siècles

12:30 pm Lunch for Speakers and Participants

2:00 pm  Visit to the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration, Palais de la Porte Dorée

Osnabrück Ausländermeldekartei

6:00 pm  Keynote Lecture at the GHI Paris

Chair: Mareike König (GHI Paris)

Christoph A. Rass (University of Osnabrück): How Migration Became Data, How Data Makes Meaning, and How Reflexive Migration Research Intervenes

Summary of the Keynote

How does historical migration research operate on the data through which migration becomes knowable, when that data is itself a product of the regimes that produce migration? This question, long posed in critical migration studies, takes on new urgency at a moment when digital infrastructures and large language models extend the reach of those regimes into the methods through which we read the archive. The DFG Collaborative Research Center 1604 ‘Production of Migration’ approaches migration as the contested outcome of social production rather than as its cause. The keynote carries that perspective into the question of digital sources and methods: not whether the new tools work, but what categorical work they reproduce, transform, and authorize.
The Osnabrück Ausländermeldekartei contains tens of thousands of handwritten cards on which a municipal authority, across much of the twentieth century, produced ‘foreigners’ as an administered population; we read the cards as records of inscription. The A3 corpus assembled within the CRC contains some six thousand academic publications written between the 1960s and the 2010s about ‘Gastarbeiterkinder’ and the categorical successors that took their place; we read it as a record of how those categories traveled into scholarly language. The two corpora capture two phases of one process: inscription, and the long afterlife in which categories, once produced, come alive. They institutionalize procedures and address those they classify; through both, they accumulate meanings that travel into the next moment of inscription, including ours.
The methods we now bring to such material extend what can be read at scale, from handwritten text recognition to corpus-linguistic analysis, with multi-modal language models operating across both. They do not release the analyst from the categorical economy of the sources. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, we locate a further site of silencing in the data infrastructures themselves: their interface design, the training material on which they were built, the limits of what they render legible at scale. Reflexive migration research does not refuse these tools. It treats them as historical objects whose categorical work continues, and writes the history of migration from inside that ongoing work.

Bio Christoph A. Rass

Christoph A. Rass is Professor of Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research at Osnabrück University and Principal Investigator in the DFG Collaborative Research Center 1604 ‘Production of Migration’. His research examines the production of migration as a social-historical process and political category. A sustained line of work traces the genealogies and institutional afterlives of categories such as ‘Gastarbeiter’, ‘Displaced Person’, and ‘Integration’; a parallel line treats administrative records, scholarly corpora, and the digital infrastructures that now process them as historical objects whose categorical operations shape what migration knowledge can be. Recent publications have appeared in the American Historical Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, History and Theory, and the Journal of Contemporary History; the monograph Inventing the ‘Guest Worker’ (with Julie M. Weise) is forthcoming with Springer.

Register for Online Participation: https://maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/webinar/register/WN_cSDsoh8WT5CJaEB1wVY7cA

Followed by a Wine Reception

Friday, June 26, 2026

9:15 am  Plenary Session: Exploring Migration Using Digital Network Analysis I

Chair: Christoph A. Rass (University of Osnabrück)

Alexandre Binoux (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/École française de Rome): Comprendre les hiérarchies d’une communauté migrante par les réseaux et la statistique. Lettres, registres paroissiaux et bases de données (colonie grecque de Corse, XVIIIe siècle)

Jorit Jens Hopp (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich): Collaboration and Migration Networks of Theatre Professionals in the Habsburg Empire of the 19th Century

10:35 am Coffee Break

11:00 am  Plenary Session: Exploring Migration Using Digital Network Analysis II

Chair: Machteld Venken (C2DH, University of Luxembourg)

Katharina Isaak (University of Münster): Mapping the Immigrant Public Sphere. The Networked Russian Language Press in the United States, 1917–1941

Piotr Budzynski (University of Łódź): Network Analysis of Polish Fulbright Scholars (1968–1990)

12:20 pm  General Discussion

1:00 pm End of Conference

Mareike König
Mareike König
Dr. Mareike König ist stellvertretende Direktorin am Deutschen Historischen Institut Paris. Sie leitet das deutschsprachige Blogportal für die Geisteswissenschaften de.hypotheses.org.

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Mareike König (May 21, 2026). Doing Migration History with Digital Methods. Summer University at the German Historical Institute Paris, 22–26 June 2026. Migration and Mobility in Historical Perspective. Retrieved June 9, 2026 from https://mwsmigration.hypotheses.org/1115


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  1. 21/05/2026

    […] === To the English version of the programme “Doing Migration History with Digital Methods“. […]

  2. 21/05/2026

    […] === To the English version of the programme “Doing Migration History with Digital Methods“. […]

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