About the author

Nora Van den Bosch (ORCID: 0000-0002-1881-5801) is a FRESH doctoral research fellow funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and a PhD researcher at the EAST (East Asian Studies) Centre of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where she conducts her research under the supervision of Professor Vanessa Frangville. From 2019 to 2025, she worked as a Data Scientist on the ENP-China and HistText research projects at Aix-Marseille University, directed by Professor Christian Henriot.

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In the spotlight: The Three 'Doctoral Sisters' in 1930s Brussels

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We are at the last day of the month and the quota for the blog needs to be met. So, without further ado, I bring the reader's attention to a historical source I saw at the Royal Library in Brussels a month ago.    Or, better: a set! The Wang sisters' dissertations (1933) In July 1932, Wang Changbao 王長寶  (b. 1906), Wang Ximin 王錫民 (b. 1909) and Wang Yazheng 王亞徵 (b. 1912) defended their doctoral dissertation at the Free University of Brussels. Each of the sisters had worked on a societal issue tied to the Chinese Republic at the time. Wang Changbao researched the sociopolical condition of women in Chinese society while Wang Ximin focused on labor by Chinese women and children and Wang Yazheng elaborated on the situation of the country's opium problem. Photo of all the Wang siblings (1929). The woman seated is Changbao. Behind her is Ximin. Yahzeng is on the right. The women graduated with flying colors and could close a decade-long chapter in their life that ...
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Starting from the end: Archival wandering in July

The end of June was a turning point for me. After six months of non-stop reading, summarizing, and logging my thoughts, I prepared documents for the supervisory committee and took the time to reflect on the next steps to take during the hot summer, which brought me to archival research on Chinese students in Belgium between 1937 and 1950. I admit that 1937-1950 might be an unusual starting point given it would cover the last chapter of my work. I start from the end, basically, but then again, the history of Sino-Belgian educational exchanges during World War II and the aftermath is completely terra incognita to me and since I’ve found material from organizations that supported Chinese students in Belgium during that period, it would be good to do an initial mapping of the events before eventually “jumping” to an earlier moment in time. So, this has been most of my July 2026 so far: going back and forth between reports, letters and meeting minutes, documenting and taking notes. I haven’...
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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...
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