New team member: Nora van den Bosch

The ENP-China project is very pleased to welcome a new team member, Nora Van den Bosch, who is joining the project as our data scientist. The search for the position of data scientist has been on-going for a whole year before we received Nora’s intriguing application. Nora first studied sinology at the Catholic University at Leuven in Belgium. She spent a whole year in China in Sichuan province (2016-17). After finishing her Master in 2018, she went on to follow a one-year program of Digital Humanities at the same university.

During that time, she developed a strong interest in applying digital techniques to historical research ends. For her thesis (« Data visualization: mapping printing centers of Christian texts in China from 1580 until 1824 »), she used data visualisation to study the geographical distribution of ‘printing churches’ of Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries. She is currently involved in several tasks in the project, including the systematic mining of Wikipedia (English, Chinese, Japanese), Wikidata, and Baidu (百度) to retrieve all the biographies and biographical data of Chinese historical figures between 1830 and 1949.