People

Javier Cha is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies in the College of Liberal Studies and the principal investigator of the Big Data Studies Lab at Seoul National University. He has been a digital humanities researcher since 2008. Javier was previously a Stanford DHAsia Fellow and contributed to the design of Leiden University’s digital humanities minor program. The concept for the Big Data Studies Lab came from a conversation with a childhood friend who is now a senior engineer with sixteen years of experience in the cloud industry.

Javier is a historian of medieval Korea with programming background. He divides his research between translating fifteenth-century Korean essays written in classical Chinese into English, developing a Neo4j database of medieval Korea’s yangban aristocrats, and working on experimental humanities projects that address the challenges posed by big data.

Lexikat is a Singapore-based company specializing in tech-assisted qualitative data analysis. It designs low- and no-code text analysis models to help bring advanced natural language processing systems within reach of non-specialist users.

Jacob Reidhead is an Assistant Professor of Social Science at KIMEP in Kazakhstan. His Ph.D. dissertation (Stanford 2020) examines the structural dynamics of political organization and discourse in South Korea and Taiwan. Dr. Reidhead has aided the Big Data Studies Lab with his expertise in network sociology, topic modeling, and semantic analysis.

Christina Han is Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She is a cultural historian of pre- and early modern Korea and China and Canadian immigration history. She is also a curator, digital humanist, and digital composer. At the Big Data Studies Lab, she is working on a pilot computational analysis of 16th-century Sino-Korean text, Sihwa ch’ongnim (Compendium of Remarks on Poetry), compiled by Hong Manjong.

Juyeon Kim is an undergraduate student in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University, pursuing a double major in Business Administration and Philosophy. Her research interests include the philosophy of time, caching technologies, real-time computing, and network society.

Nabanita Dash is a full-stack developer at JuliaComputing. Among her numerous research interests are machine learning, digital forensics, encryption, and differential privacy. Nabanita contributed blog posts to the Big Data Studies Lab about mobile forensics and decompiling Android apps.

Yennie Jun currently works at Truveta as a machine learning engineer. Yennie contributed research on web archives and long-term preservation technologies during her time at the Big Data Studies Lab and subsequently completed her MSc with distinction in Social Data Science at Oxford University.

Robin Na is a predoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Social Minds at Carnegie Mellon University. Robin is a physicist who is particularly fascinated by complex systems and social data. He lent his expertise in network analysis to the Big Data Studies Lab.

Eugene Jang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include big data surveillance, data doubles, and digital contact tracing. During her stay at the Big Data Studies Lab, Eugene designed and led a research project on Covid-19 contact tracing using newspaper data from the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.