Join us for an engaging talk by Wenyi Shang, titled Moving Beyond the Streetlight: How Computational Methods Can Open Up New Directions in Humanities Research.

The “streetlight effect” describes an observational bias relevant to the humanities and social sciences, where researchers tend to focus on the questions limited by the scales of materials they can directly comprehend. The application of computational methods in the humanities research has the potential to transform this landscape, providing interpretative tools to offer new insights into the macroscopic trends that studies at the individual and microscopic scale often fail to reveal. This talk presents two case studies to demonstrate how computational methods can open up new directions in humanities research. The first uses machine learning models to classify English poetry by lexicon and prosody, shedding new light on the distinction between “genre” and “form.” The second applies social network analysis to explore the structural characteristics of political networks in Northern Song (960–1127 C.E.) China, revealing changes in political culture during the period.

Please join us in person in Humanities 1, Room 210 or via Zoom

Wenyi Shang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri. He earned his Ph.D. from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his bachelor’s degree from Peking University, China. His research focuses on digital humanities, addressing scholarly inquiries in history and literature through computational methods. He has employed network analysis to investigate social structures and transformations in political culture in premodern Chinese societies, and used text mining to study literature, uncovering novel perspectives on cultural changes reflected in literary texts. Both methods frequently intersect with machine learning models.