Shih-Pei Chen is IT Researcher and Senior Research Scholar in Department III, “Artifacts, Action, and Knowledge,” of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
She is a Digital Humanities specialist trained in computer science. Shih-Pei’s research focuses on applying information technologies to advance historical research, in particular textual analysis, research tool design, geospatial mapping, and visual analytics.
Shih-Pei is currently working on two projects: “Local Gazetteers” and “Everyday Knowledge and Its Sources in the Sinosphere, 14th to 20th Centuries.” In the former, her team has developed a research tool called LoGaRT that allows scholars to collect historical data from local gazetteers, a long-standing genre for recording local conditions across historical China. Visual statistical analytics then help scholars to obtain global patterns from these data and gain deep empirical understanding of the genre and of the empire. Based on this experience, Shih-Pei’s team plan to extend their technologies to another type of text, the household encyclopedia. They aim to trace the sources of the everyday knowledge that appears in such texts and to understand how knowledge was selected, circulated, and produced as the intellectual focus of society in late Imperial China shifted from imperial elite knowledge to daily knowledge.
As a representative of the MPIWG IT Research Group in the Extended Teaching Faculty of the IMPRS, Shih-Pei helps to design and organize the IMPRS campus curriculum on the topic of Digital Humanities.
Find out more about Shih-Pei Chen on the MPIWG website.