»Computing the Social« Interview Moritz Feichtinger

Interview, camera & editing: Lennart Vincent Schmidt

 

How can historians study historical databases and algorithmic systems that were never intended to serve as traditional sources? And what do they reveal about the relationship between technology, knowledge, and power? In conversation with Moritz Feichtinger, we explore how data-driven population control, digital infrastructures, and new methodological approaches intersect — from surveillance during the Vietnam War to today’s challenges of digital source criticism.

 

In the summer of 2025, Moritz Feichtinger from the University of Basel was a Summer Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam. As part of the Digital Inequalities project, we discussed with him data-based forms of population control, digital infrastructures, and innovative methodological approaches to the analysis of so-called “born-digital” sources.

In his research project Computing the Social, Feichtinger links the history of database-driven surveillance during the Vietnam War with the development of computational methods for the historical analysis of digital artefacts. At the core of the project is a case study from the 1960s and 1970s, when the U.S. Department of Defense employed state-of-the-art computer technologies and behavioral science approaches to record, classify, and model the political attitudes of the South Vietnamese population. The aim was to generate a detailed picture of social loyalties and forms of resistance through systematic data collection and algorithmic analysis — and ultimately to enable political control.