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. from the School of Information Sciences at 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 focuses on digital humanities, exploring scholarly inquiries in history and literature through computational methods. By leveraging digital technologies, I aim to offer fresh insights into the macroscopic trends that studies at the individual and microscopic scales often fail to reveal. Grounded in the perspective of information science, my work also informs and guides methodological reflection in the humanities and social science disciplines.

Methodologically, I employ a range of computational techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing, social network analysis, spatial analysis, and generative AI models. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I strive to integrate these quantitative methods with qualitative approaches. My research features a “moving between scales” approach—also the title of my dissertation—which entails the simultaneous analysis of large-scale data at the macro level, followed by close readings of individual records at the micro level. This strategy addresses the limitations of computational methods in the humanities, particularly their inability to capture the perspectival and interpretive nuances central to humanistic inquiry.

My scholarly work falls into three main areas: First, I work as a historian, applying computational methods to revisit longstanding questions in Chinese history, with a particular focus on the medieval period. Representative publications in this area include articles published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of Historical Network Research, International Journal of Digital Humanities. Second, I work with humanities scholars, serving as both a methodologist and a disciplinary translator, engaging in topics ranging from English poetry to German fiction. Representative publications in this area include articles published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Sociological Science, and Humanities. Third, I analyze bibliographic metadata to examine the opportunities and challenges it presents, revealing new insights into book history and print culture. Related to this, I also study digital humanities as a field, investigating its development and disciplinary dynamics. Representative publications in this area include articles published in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Information Research, and ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).

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 (last updated June 6, 2025).