How to Tell the Story of 40,000 Chinese Students Across the Pacific: A Data-Rich History (1850–1950)

Hands on History talk with Cécile Armand

In this presentation, Cécile Armand, visiting researcher at the C²DH, introduces her ongoing research on Chinese students educated in the United States between the Opium Wars and the early years of the People’s Republic of China (1850–1950). The project aims to reconstruct their careers and networks from a transnational and multigenerational perspective, while also mapping the ideological discourses surrounding them. To do so, it draws on both untapped digitized corpora (Who’s Who directories, student journals, newspapers) and born-digital sources such as Wikipedia and Baidu, using computational methods to extract biographical information and identify discursive patterns at scale. This data-rich approach seeks to move beyond hagiographic portrayals of exemplary figures and to challenge the dominant view of overseas study as primarily a nation-building enterprise. The presentation will outline the research context, present preliminary findings from pilot studies, and discuss future directions for scaling up the project.

• Add to calendar
• Join online