The COEB Research Blog

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...

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...