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The article analyses the transformation of Swiss migration statistics through digital data processing in the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the emergence of two different modes of migration statistics management within the Swiss federal administration. First, in the early 1970s, the Swiss Federal Aliens Police implemented an electronic database with comprehensive statistics on foreigners, the so-called Central Aliens Register. It was devised as a data-driven instrument for regulating labour supply within the scope of the Western European guest worker regime. Then, in the mid-1980s, the Swiss Federal Statistical Office introduced periodical population scenario analysis. The modelling of future demographic scenarios, based on existing data, shifted the perspective towards a new global migration framework. It is shown how this computerisation of statistical data infrastructures in the 1970s/1980s enabled the combination of different regulatory regimes for population movements within the federal administration (labour/asylum), thus, contributing to the formation of a Swiss migration regime.

At the turn of the twentieth century, so-called "glass diseases" seriously affected the use of scientific and technical glassware. It had become apparent by 1900 that glass, a supposedly neutral and inert material, not only interacted with its environment but also interfered with anything it contained-chemically, physically, and biologically. Starting from the assumption that modern laboratory research depends on containers that regulate the spatial, material, and epistemic enclosure of its experimental milieus and objects, this essay argues that the standardization of glass quality from the 1900s to the 1930s must be understood as a reconfiguration of a "marginal" but nonetheless constitutive element of modern laboratory environments. The aim here is thus to weave various threads together into an (un)natural history of a modern material, one that considers epistemology, technology, and ontology-or, more specifically, the changing requirements and functions of glassware in the modern laboratory, the invention of specifically adapted glass substances, and the parallel advancement of glass science and its theories of what glass actually is.Kijan Espahangizi is a historian at the University of Zurich. His work focuses on the intersection of history of science and material history, as well as on the relation of knowledge and politics. He is the author of "Wissenschaft im Glas: Eine historische Ökologie moderner Laborforschung" (Ph.D. diss., ETH Zurich, 2010); coeditor (with Barbara Orland) of Stoffe in Bewegung: Beiträge zu einer Wissensgeschichte der materiellen Welt (Diaphanes, 2014); and coeditor (with Monika Wulz) of "The Political and the Epistemic in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives," a special issue of KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge (Fall 2020).

Glass vessels such as flasks and test tubes play an ambiguous role in the historiography of modern laboratory research. In spite of the strong focus on the role of materiality in the last decades, the scientific glass vessel - while being symbolically omnipresent - has remained curiously neglected in regard to its materiality. The popular image or topos of the transparent, neutral, and quasi-immaterial glass container obstructs the view of the physico-chemical functionality of this constitutive inner boundary in modern laboratory environments and its material historicity. In order to understand how glass vessels were able to provide a stable epistemic containment of spatially enclosed experimental phenomena in the new laboratory ecologies emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, I will focus on the history of the material standardization of laboratory glassware. I will follow the rise of a new awareness for measurement errors due to the chemical agency of experimental glass vessels, then I will sketch the emergence of a whole techno-scientific infrastructure for the improvement of glass container quality in late nineteenth-century Germany. In the last part of my argument, I will return to the laboratory by looking at the implementation of this glass reform that created a new oikos for the inner experimental milieus of modern laboratory research.