About Me

Welcome! I am an assistant professor at the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri. I earned my Ph.D. at the School of Information Sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was advised by Professor Ted Underwood. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, I earned a bachelor’s degree in information management at Peking University, China.

My research uses computational methods to study the development of human society. I have made contributions to digital humanities and computational social science, using the perspective of information science to inform and guide methodological reflection in both fields. My dissertation, titled “Moving Between Scales: Computationally Modeling Social Dynamics in the Elite Society of Premodern China,” applies computational methods to revisit longstanding questions in Chinese social, cultural, and political history. It leverages social scientific models to offer fresh insights into the macroscopic trends that studies at the individual and microscopic scales often fail to reveal.

Methodologically, I have employed network analysis to investigate social structures and transformations in political culture in premodern Chinese societies. I have also used text mining to uncover new insights into literary history, revealing the valuable perspectives that literary texts offer concerning cultural changes in human society. Both methods often intersect with machine learning models. Additionally, my work involves exploring bibliographic metadata to examine the opportunities and challenges it presents. My articles on these subjects have been featured in peer-reviewed journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Sociological Science, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, and Journal of Historical Network Research.

I occasionally share non-academic writings (in Chinese) on my personal WeChat Official Account “翡翠岛燕谈” (Leisurely Discourse on the Emerald Isle). You can find it by scanning the following QR code using the WeChat app:

You can view my CV here: Wenyi Shang’s Curriculum Vitae.