Wenyi Shang earned his Ph.D. in Information Sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his bachelor’s degree in information management from Peking University, China.

His research focuses on digital humanities, exploring scholarly inquiries in history and literature through computational methods. Methodologically, he employs a range of computational techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing, social network analysis, spatial analysis, and generative AI.

His scholarly work falls into three main areas: First, he works as a humanities scholar specializing in medieval China, applying computational methods to revisit longstanding questions in the social, political, cultural, and literary history of the period. Second, he works with humanities scholars, serving as both a methodologist and a disciplinary translator, engaging in topics ranging from English poetry to German fiction. Third, he analyzes bibliographic metadata to examine the opportunities and challenges it presents, revealing new insights into book history and print culture. Related to this, he also draws on library and information science to study scholarly communication in the humanities, particularly digital humanities.

Areas of Expertise

Digital Humanities

Subject areas:

• Digital History
• Computational Literary Studies
• Computational Social Science
• Book History and Print Culture
• Scholarly Communication

Methods:

• Machine Learning
• Text Mining and Natural Language Processing
• Network Analysis
• Spatial Analysis
• Generative AI