What is your professional background and your main research area?
"I am employed as a research assistant at SHAPE. I have a Master's degree in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University, where I specialized in historical novels, literary culture and historiography. I am very interested in historiography and the conditions for cultural production, and I have worked a lot with popular culture and especially the role of popular culture historically in political and social contexts.

I have also worked with cultural heritage and digitization in museums, so in a broad sense I am interested in the many processes associated with the production of historical narratives, the production of cultural and historical artefacts, and which institutions and actors help determine what is “real” culture or the “real” history. In my current work, I am interested in how technological history is created in the interplay between system developers, public media, cultural life, the civil service and later representations of the introduction of computerization in Denmark from the 1950s onwards with CPR as a case study."

What is your affiliation with SHAPE and what is your current research project in SHAPE about?
"I am affiliated with a research project on the history of the social security number, led by Peter Lauritsen. CPR is a data infrastructure that is ubiquitous in public administration, and it's a system that is unique to the Nordic region. Yet it is an infrastructure that we rarely think about. In this project, we are interested in making this infrastructure more visible and looking at how the use of the social security number affects the relationship between citizen and state. We are interested in the specific ideas that the CPR helps to form and how these ideas may differ among, for example, the civil service, public media, cultural life or politicians.

In particular, we are interested in how the CPR has played a crucial role in the digitization of the Danish welfare society even before its introduction in 1968. My role has been to collect historical empirical data and examine the connections between legislation, public and political debate, cultural artifacts, and civil servants' conceptions of CPR - everything from meeting notes from the Ministry of the Interior, national newspapers from 1960 onwards, to a collection of poems about CPR from 1969."

What impact do you expect your project to have on society or your research field?
"First and foremost, we believe the project plays an important role in the overall narrative of the digitalization of public administration in Denmark. We often ask the question what Denmark and the welfare state would look like if the CPR disappeared tomorrow. Everything from borrowing a book from the library, to collecting taxes, to the health data that healthcare professionals use to treat patients would be gone. In many ways, the CPR is central to the administration of our welfare state, and the question is to what extent the CPR has helped shape the organization of today's public administration.

At the same time, we are concerned with how the CPR is in many ways quite successful and not the subject of much controversy. In recent times, however, there have been discussions about the binary gender understanding behind the construction of the social security number. By discovering some of the early discussions about the social security number and the CPR system, it also makes it easier to open up to discuss this large infrastructure today - for example, whether a gender-neutral social security number is conceivable and what the effects of this would be."