Shih-pei Chen 陳詩沛
Partner
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Working group: Digital Humanities
Shih-pei Chen is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) and a specialist in Digital Humanities. With an academic background in mathematics and computer science, she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from National Taiwan University in 2011. Her research focuses on designing digital research methods, tools, and infrastructures that enable historians to engage with digitized historical materials from new perspectives. She has led the development of several major projects, including the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), the CHMap web-based geographic information system for open historical mapping of China (in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University), and the RISE & SHINE technical infrastructure and API protocols that support the exchange of digital texts among research tools and resource providers.
At MPIWG, she leads the “Local Gazetteers Working Group,” which has contributed to the production of dozens of research papers through the use of LoGaRT. Currently, she heads another research group titled “Common Knowledge and Its Sources in the Sinosphere, 14th–20th Centuries,” which uses machine learning and image-based computational methods to investigate how “common knowledge” in Chinese history evolved from elite and literati genres, and how it diverged from literati knowledge over time.