Paul Vierthaler appointed CDH associate faculty director

We’re excited to announce that Paul Vierthaler, assistant professor of Chinese literature and interdisciplinary data science, has joined the Center for Digital Humanities as associate faculty director.

A specialist in late imperial Chinese literature and print history, Vierthaler came to Princeton last year from the College of William & Mary. His book project uses computational methods, such as natural language processing and machine learning, to explore how late imperial fiction and “quasi-histories” distort historical information.

“Paul will bring his unique perspective as a leading expert in East Asian Studies DH to the CDH, as well as his years of experience with collaborative computational humanities scholarship and teaching,” explained CDH Faculty Director Meredith Martin. “But more than all of that, we just feel lucky to have Paul among us; he's brilliant, truly engaged in the field, and an absolute pleasure to work with.”

Vierthaler quickly became part of Princeton’s digital humanities community. In addition to serving on the CDH executive committee, he collaborated with Anna M. Shields, Gordon Wu ’58 professor of Chinese studies and longtime CDH affiliate, on this summer’s China-Princeton Digital Humanities Workshop. The weeklong series of DH training sessions, co-sponsored by the CDH, brought together graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty for sessions on topics from text analysis to databases to MARKUS and markup platforms.

As Associate Faculty Director, Vierthaler will build upon this work by contributing to the CDH’s strategic planning and participating in this year’s Modeling Cultures seminars. This fall, he will also add to Princeton’s computational and data humanities (CDH) course offerings by teaching two CDH-coded classes: an undergraduate course, EAS 307 / CDH 307: Digitally Detecting the Strange: Crimes, Ghosts, and Other Odd Things in Late Imperial China; and EAS 407 / CDH 407: Hacking Chinese Studies: An Introduction to Text Mining for Chinese Literature and Culture, which is open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

Vierthaler’s expertise in East Asian digital humanities will advance the CDH’s recent emphasis on multilingual DH, with initiatives including the African Languages in the Age of AI Speaker Series and the Digital Humanities for Hellenic Studies Summer Institute.

"I've spent my career up to this point using computational methods to study late imperial Chinese literature and print history, mostly focusing on works written between 1500 to 1800. As such, I work with material written in languages that have significantly different affordances than English and other Western languages, which tend to dominate the digital humanities landscape in North America and Europe,” Vierthaler explained. “At the Center for Digital Humanities, I am particularly excited to leverage this interest in underserved languages to collaborate with folks to help enhance the already very impressive work the Center is doing in multilingual DH.”