Weixuan Li is a Ph.D. candidate in the project Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research, a joint force of the Huygens ING and the University of Amsterdam, co-led by Prof. Charles van den Heuvel and Prof. Julia Noordegraaf. Her dissertation project tries to contextualize the artists’ lives in Golden Age Amsterdam through multi-layered deep mapping to understand the relationship between the urban fabric and artists’ location choice within the city.
Weixuan ventured into the uncharted territory of digital art history in 2016 when she started her research master of the Arts of the Netherlands at the University of Amsterdam. In 2017, she was selected as the pre-PhD fellow at the digital humanities center, Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective (CREATE), at UvA. Her pre-PhD projects at CREATE include 1) Visualizing the spread of Ideas, 2) Imitation and emulation in Rembrandt’s neighborhood, and 3) Constructing a network of artistic ideas through Iconography. The last was selected by the international organization, Historians of Netherlandish Art, as one of its three digital art history projects for the Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in the U.S. In spring 2018, she started her internship at the Huygens ING under the auspice of Prof. Charles van den Heuvel, working on the Golden Agents project. Her research master (cum laude) was concluded with a thesis, Deciphering the art and market in the Dutch Golden Age: Insights from digital methodologies, which won the thesis prize of the Faculty of Humanities and was nominated for the UvA thesis prize.
Before moving to the Netherlands, Weixuan worked as transportation economists in Boston after graduating from the dual-masters program in Urban Planning and Transportation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Originally from China, Weixuan studied Urban Planning and Economics at Peking University. Combining her training in digital methods at MIT and art history at the University of Amsterdam, Weixuan aspires to bring together humanities research and advanced information technology.
