Dr Hsiu Yi Wang is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Sociology, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and her research applies digital tools to the study of development, informal economy, and gender. She has collected over 40,000 digitized news articles about Taiwanese street vendors, totalling approximately 50 million characters, bringing the historical dynamics of the informal economy to life at the national level.

Using Python, she merged these materials into a thematic corpus and conducted qualitative text analysis to develop a new epistemology of the informal economy. She currently employs text mining and sentiment analysis to uncover forms of bottom-up resistance in informal politics. This research demonstrates how digital methods can illuminate development studies in informal economies, providing insights into social, economic, and cultural dynamics, and reflects the department’s emphasis on humanistic inquiry, critical analysis of society, and interdisciplinary methodological innovation.

Selected publications

• Wang, H.-Y. (2017). Global development and trends in digital humanities. In F.-S. Lin (Ed.), White Paper on Digital Humanities (pp. 179–567). Taipei: Digital Culture Center, Academia Sinica.
• Hsiu Yi Wang, 2022, Development, Informal Economy, and Gender: A Case Study of Street Vendors in Taiwan” Proposal presented at the London Text Analysis Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
• Hsiu Yi Wang, 2023, Informal Economy and Street Democracy: Street Vendors in Taiwan 1951-2019” Paper presented at the 51st Annual Conference of the American History of Economics Society(HES)USA, Universidad del Desarrollo Santiago, Santiago, Chile (* Presented remotely from Taipei)