People
Principal Investigator
Javier Cha is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department History and the principal investigator of the Big Data Studies Lab at the University of Hong Kong. Javier has been a digital humanities researcher since 2008. Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, he was a founding member of the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities and taught at the interdisciplinary College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University.
Javier divides his research time between translations of essays written in classical Chinese into English, the application of graph database technology in historical scholarship, and experimental humanities projects that address the challenges posed by big data and artificial intelligence.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Jenny Kwok is a Post-doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the School of Humanities, The University of Hong Kong. Her research interests center on the intersection of humanities and sciences, the tradition of liberal education, and fin de siècle Anglo-Irish writers. Currently, she is engaged in two digital humanities projects. The first is a machine learning project that investigates the trend of course offerings at the Oxford English School from 1912-2012. It argues that this trend directly reflects the changing societal perception of English Studies. The second project is a topic modeling endeavor that seeks to identify stylistic patterns of Anglo-Irish writers.
Research Associate
Jing Hu is a social historian and a digital humanities specialist. She is currently a Research Librarian in the East Asia department at the Berlin State Library. Jing obtained her MA in Cultural Informatics from the Academy of Korean Studies in 2014. From 2014 to 2016, she was a researcher at Renmin University of China. Subsequently, she has pursued her PhD at Leiden University (2016-2022) and KU Leuven (2022-present). She has contributed to notable digital humanities projects, including K-MARKUS and ZGZY Parallels.
Undergraduate Researchers
Solomon Kit Shing Ho is an undergraduate student at the University of Hong Kong, double majoring in Humanities and Digital Technologies and Computer Science. His research interests include virtual reality, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and computational linguistics.
Junwoo Park is an undergraduate student at the University of Hong Kong, double majoring in Humanities and Digital Technologies and Cognitive Science. His research interests include temporality in the digital world, the sociology of time, and media technologies.
Industry Partners and Experts
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.
In 2023, Yennie Jun rejoins BDSL as an industry expert. During her previous stint at BDSL from 2019 to 2021, Yennie contributed research on web archives and long-term preservation technologies. Yennie completed her MSc with distinction in Social Data Science at Oxford University in 2021 and previously worked at the healthcare startup Truveta as a machine learning engineer.
Winnie Yeung is a software engineer with a keen focus on exploratory data analysis and machine learning. She completed her BSc in Statistics at the University of Toronto. Winnie has contributed her skills to innovative startups and helped develop The Coding School’s Machine Learning curriculum. Beyond her technical acumen, she holds a strong interest in enhancing the accessibility of tech education and ensuring ethical practices in technology research and applications.
Former Members
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.
Jacob Reidhead is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at National Chengchi University in Taipei. His Ph.D. dissertation (Stanford 2020) examines the structural dynamics of political organization and discourse in South Korea and Taiwan. Dr. Reidhead aided the Big Data Studies Lab with his expertise in network sociology, topic modeling, and semantic analysis.
Ezrah Huong, Nadja Nielsen, and Maximilian Rix from the University of Copenhagen contributed valuable research in big data energetics in the Nordic region using Danish and Norwegian sources.
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.
Robin Na is a PhD student in Information Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was previously 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 science 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.
International Advisory Board
Columbia University
Stanford University
Seoul National University
Universidad de Buenos Aires
University of Chicago
University of Edinburgh