The COEB Research Blog

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About Time!

Network analysis, chronologies and the history written around Chinese students abroad At the beginning of May I attended a series of talks on historical network analysis organised by DH Ratio at the Free Université of Brussels. Historical network analysis is, simplistically put, studying connections between objects (mostly people, but can also be places, documents, words) that are traced or signalled in historical sources. The connections can be any-thing : from someone following someone else on facebook to borrowing money to mentioning someone in a letter to people posing in the same photograph to names co-occuring in a biography to migration paths between villages. The primary goal of network analysis is not to find out whether there are connections between things, but how a particular object is situated in a particular set of connections (network). It concerns questions like: Where are the centers? Which objects form the centers of all connections? Which objects bridge...

Reviewing Elicit

During the semester, the library staff at the Université Libre de Bruxelles offered a series of 15 minute introductions of research tools for students. One of the introduction mini-courses that I attended was about an AI literature review tool, called Elicit. After the session, I did two sessions of playing around with the tool, the first one taking in March and the other one dated a few days ago. In this post, I review the experiences that I have with Elicit so far. But first, why did I try Elicit? At the time, I wondered what would happen if we picked up research literature based on textual patterns tied to the keywords we put in. One of the challenges that I experienced in finding literature through traditional keyword matching is 1/ finding the keywords that researchers use in their historiography of Chinese overseas students and 2/selecting threads of literature that focus on the subtopics I cared about. So, the idea of using an LLM that draws higher-level overarching con...

The Very Brief History of the First Chinese Student House in Belgium

Post card – Place Maghin (1) Number 5 was like any other residence building at the Maghin Square. It was situated in a neighborhood far away from the bustling center of Liège, with an unblocked view of the Saint-Léonard prison and in short walking distance of the river La Meuse . And yet, in the morning of February 18, 1904, it started to attract onlookers to its facade. The house had recently got a new purpose and had had to undergo a sudden transformation to meet it. In the two weeks leading up to that day, people had moved in and out to prepare the place and local newspapers had dedicated a few lines of reporting to the changing interior, mentioning military-style beds being carried to the second floor, the arrival of a blackboard for one level below and plans of installing gymnastic devices in the large garden. (2) But the interior's redressing was not what peaked local interest. It was the new inhabitants whose clothes had been described in vivid detail...

Trust and Speculation at the Archives: where fiction and reality meet

Last December I read Trust by Hernán Díaz, about an obscenely wealthy couple in 1920s New York, whose story is told by four competing texts: an infamous novel, an defensive autobiography, a expository memoir, and a lost diary. I had never encountered this kind of story-telling, but, because of a small clip of Dua Lipa interviewing the author, I wanted to give it a try, and I can say: the novel did not disappoint. The story absolutely delivers, and in such a way that it made me think about my research. So, the rest of this blog post will contain my reflections about the theme of Trust and how it applies to archival visits. Let’s go! (Oh, BTW, even though I won’t spoil anything too much below, I still recommend you to read the book yourself.) So, the theme of Trust ! Well, it is about… Trust. But what kind of trust are we talking about? Trust in what way? Even though the thesis is not spelled out in the text, the author brings forth different understandings of trust by subvertin...

Visit at the Institut belge des hautes études chinoises

At the end of January this year I went to the Art & History Museum in Brussels where I had the privilege to visit the archives of the Institut belge des hautes études chinoises and got access to copies of Chinese student dossiers. The dossiers in question were produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, around the time that the Boxer Indemnities scholarship program was formally established between China and Belgium. (1) The files are mostly forms filled in by Chinese students who were residing in Belgium at the time or had just arrived. The documents are either part of the application for the Boxer scholarship or part of registration upon arrival. After carefully sorting the photo copies, I came to a unique total of 183 Chinese student dossiers. Even though the archival material does not cover all students in the 1930s, the collection of forms is still very informative for two main things: 1) The documents provide informat...